Pedal Stools

You only know what you know. Beyond that, you cannot know. And sometimes, knowing can be dangerous, so even if you know a little, maybe you don’t want to know very much.

Ignorance is bliss, they say. How well I understand this! Even more so as a technically functioning adult working a 9-to-5. Used to be there was a time I wanted to know everything but everything is the very thing I cannot know. Maybe the very thing I should not know. In any case, I no longer wish this.

Today, older, wiser, I wish for calm. But then again, not much wiser and duplicitously youngish, I can’t always control my recklessness. Or my curiosity. More often than not, that is the root cause to my life’s problems. One day if I ever learn to control my seemingly insatiable thirst for stories, I might truly start to live under the radar and be at peace. Sounds boring, though.

Drama I am not a part of is something I can’t seem to chill with. I revel in it. Incurable gossip, you might call me. Which is not nice and I am very selective about the people I share gossip with, but the ones I do gossip with… whoo! Zero limits.

One thing I have actually learned finally is to consider people’s feelings and their lives. I have learned to appreciate that people were not brought up the same as me. I have come to understand that even twins could have a vastly differing POV and act in diametrically opposite ways. How much more so your everyday Joes and Jills, your Rahuls and Anjalis, I don’t know a Mizo equivalent – maybe Lianas and Mawiis (those are my parents’ names, by the way!).

It is so easy to judge. And judge away, all you like. But when you do recount your judgments, exercise caution. You don’t know who you hurt. You don’t know how karma can (and will!) bitch-slap you for what you did. You just don’t know who is good and who is bad. Or in fact, are we good or bad really? Even Jesus didn’t answer that question.

Someone wonderful to you can be absolutely loathsome to someone else. So don’t hype people up and put them on pedal stools. Pedal… stools… pedastools? Pedestals? It’s probably pedestals, yes.

People don’t belong on pedestals. They belong in lives. In all its rich complexity.