I lost meaning yesterday. Let me clarify. The carefully constructed picture in my head of my life was shattered. I would like to point out that this is not the first time this has happened. I was ambling towards some weird and abstract goals when suddenly there was no meaning to it all. I wish I could compare this to the rug being snatched from under your feet but in that scenario you fall on hard ground and you can begin again. When you lose meaning, there is no definite place where you can start from again. I imagine it’s like floating around in space in a suit that does not let you die and is fairly comfortable but you have nothing to do, nowhere to go, nowhere to be.
It is almost like getting a second perspective on things. You keep on doing the same things as you did before but there is no drive, no reason, and no satisfaction to be had from the accomplishment of your tasks. Interestingly enough, your actions, your responses and your gestures lose meaning. You smile because some part of your brain remembers that, smiling is the correct thing to do at the moment or rather that before you went crazy you would have smiled given the current circumstances. The problem is, for the life of me I cannot figure out the reasons hence the loss of meaning.
Everything seems different – empty. One would hope that with my history with this kind of thing, I would know by now what to do or at least be able to handle it better but every time it’s as empty and as cold as before. Sometimes it seems the intensity increases with each passing cycle.
What really drives me crazy is the silence inside my head. The cacophony of ideas, schemes and goals is no more. It is so quiet that you could hear a whisper even before it was uttered. The rainbow of colors is replaced by a dull black, the kind that wouldn’t thin or waver given a hundred years.
The outside world keeps revolving as it always did, it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore. You hear things and you see things but you cannot quite decipher them. The ability to make sense of it all is no more. Maybe the ability is there but the will is lost – I cannot be sure.
And now to the climax, the meaning comes back as surely as it goes away. If there is one thing I have learned it is that it does come back. However, that does not remove the fear that the next time it happens, I might not make it back. The real point apart from this is that, one could only lose meaning if that meaning was not completely correct. I would hope that if the meaning of all that you did was completely correct then you would not lose meaning like I do. That is what scares me the most, if it ultimately turns out that my interpretation of it all was off the mark, then would there still be enough time to make amends or would it be too late? Hell, is it already too late?
