Addiction?

How do we define obsession? Perhaps it is when we cannot stop listening to that one song? When the music transports you, reflecting on a connection to the past, redolent with the history of turbulence?  Maybe I speak quietly for the multiple generations who constantly searched for a collective security deep within, our nation, the world out.

Single key strokes wakes up my senses. Gently rocked to a time when ignorant confidence allowed for that expression of surety that freedom and peace were just waiting around the corner. Now we taste the fruits of liberation and it is bittersweet, riddled with the lost naiveté of the youth. Activists struggle to lay down battle axes. We traded the spear for the pen, the jalloppie for the four by four and the benches of third class for the soft seats of business flying.

Deep down though, the melancholy transported with the melody makes me realize that those are the dreams of the few… the tens of thousands meet regularly at the payout queue, where the local survivalist vendor hovers between charity and greed. Children skipping school fearing that their absence will once again deprive them of the chance to get that name brand shoe, bought on credit, the weave to make me look sleek and sexy.

In the lighter notes I accept, the collective benefits. A franchise I’ll never dare to give up, basic services making local authorities hovering on the brink of going bust. All the while there is the interest of the middle class masses slaving to quench the natural craving for comfort. Cymbals like full stops, understanding that our lives are trapped in time and space transient, the inter-generational transfer ambient.

Actions punctuated by the learned responses recorded by the social network driven watchdogs. They hold it out to constantly shift, those who know, speaking on behalf of the environment, the poor, the disenfranchised, the politically oppressed, even the rich. A permanently rotating petition – the cause of the day – noble, add your name at the end of the list if you are against A or for B and hit forward to the contacts in your list. Please? It will only take a minute and for that you will also get the benefit of being engaged – inadvertently involved. Inevitably claiming or retaining the title activist.

I press repeat again, it is more than a mantra in the end. It becomes like that inner clock, the will to breathe, blink an eye. Are you there with the toll-free number to call, addicted to the notes; distinguishing between piano, violin, and the undertow of the drum… it keeps the rhythm of life.

Rich, poor, happy, sad, hungry, homeless, sick, healthy, unhappy, content, ignorant, educated,  in luxury, the bible, the visionary, the temple high on a Himalayan peak, the tokkeloshi, the shaman, and the dispenser of muti in a white coat. Where is this all taking us? The world will always be a turbulent place it seems.

Again, I hit repeat and it makes me smile!

By Simone Beatrice Naik Hagfeldt, 2014-03-26.