A Message for the Future

5 minute read

I wanted my message to the future to be different, at least as I express it here. Who knows how I might express it in the future, or how I will look back upon this article, which comes close to the end of my attempt to express what I feel within.

I have made many mistakes over the past year. In truth, my heart has made many mistakes during that time. There was at least one moment that could have redeemed this entire difficult period, but my heart would not allow it.

I am not thinking about the past before this period, because that is simply the past. But what has been happening for almost a year will certainly mark my future.

Who knows? Perhaps everything that has happened to me also arose from my actions in the past, when I decided it was right to change my life. I believed there was no reason to remain with someone until death while constantly reproaching each other, arguing and sometimes almost coming to blows. That was one of the principal reasons I chose to exchange a future filled with anger for one of peace.

At that time, my heart gave me something beautiful, something I believed - and still believe - possessed potential. But cause and effect exist. The reasons do not matter; what matters is what you leave behind. Now that I feel the consequences upon my own skin, I understand how painful they are.

For anything I may have done wrong, in thought or action, towards those whom I loved or still love, I offered my mea culpa long ago. Of course I was conscious then as well, and I had other, far more serious problems. Yet what I carried in my heart enabled me to move easily beyond material difficulties.

Once, the person whom destiny carried towards her present fate - with my help, obviously - told me that I would suffer greatly. She was right. I later passed the same warning onwards. Everything was different, and my actions were different, yet both my actions then and those of the recent past were directed by my heart.

That is what made me suffer: I love, and I have loved, what happens within my heart. I believe it was given to me and does not belong to me.

When I felt the suffering within - and I still feel it constantly - my heart seemed weak, as though it did not belong to me. I wanted another future for it, but destiny is a whore. It deceives you precisely so that it can destroy your heart, destroy what is beautiful, and prevent others from hoping or following the path of the heart.

To put it more clearly, I have often watched the suffering of my heart, and lately it has become real pain. It affects me, yet somehow does not belong to me. It is as though I were watching someone else suffer.

I would have acted completely differently had I followed my thinking. I would have destroyed things and brought suffering to those around me, not only to myself, because during that first period I would not have felt the pain anyway. Yet I always followed the heart, and this brought suffering. I could say that suffering is my life's second nature.

Some people suffer for material reasons and others because they remain unfulfilled. Since I awakened, however, I have felt almost nothing but suffering, because the heart cannot remain indifferent to what happens around it. I suffered still more when something attacked the very centre of my heart and, therefore, the centre of my life.

Sometimes I wonder what mechanism makes us inhuman. How can we treat someone we once loved with indifference and wish to be rid of them as though they had caused us terrible harm?

I can understand when ugly things happened, when two people spat at each other and respect had sunk to the bottom. Then at least there is a human reason. Otherwise, I can find no excuse. I can only console my heart with the thought that the person I lov... became what I once detested most in other people.

What mechanism enabled me to overlook so many things I could never have tolerated before? What mechanism strips you of your own personality and makes you desire something that is not worthwhile?

The mechanism of thought would tell you to run from such a person as fast as your legs could carry you, forget they ever existed and wish for the earth to quake, for everything around you to disappear, for no trace of life to remain upon the planet. Only then, thought tells you, could you feel fulfilled.

The mechanism of the heart is entirely different. It makes you feel responsible for every mistake and for the future suffering of both yourself and the person you love. It makes you wish away every moment that might have weakened the other person's love and lived experience.

It makes you feel powerless and alone in this world filled with love. Once you saw love everywhere; now you ask why you are drinking tea from an empty cup. It makes you wish you had disappeared at the first moment you felt all this, that you had instantly turned to ash and that the wind had scattered every trace of your existence upon this earth to the four corners.

The only conclusion or explanation I can find is that I was right about myself: my place in this world should have disappeared at the moment I was born. Then I would have caused neither suffering nor a happiness destined to pass.

I smile bitterly and move onwards, wondering how the hell I managed to write a book I do not deserve, when my life bears almost no resemblance to it. What use are miracles that happen only within, while everything beautiful outside turns to ash?

First published in Romanian on 26 February 2011. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Mesaj pentru viitor.