The Eternal Doom.

How to empty the mind?

How to shed the weight of my identity?

All the information on how life is supposed to be?

What tablets can make me forget it all?

It has been told one too many times,

“Life is what you make it,”

Whilst they quietly prescribe what steps to take,

And how year by year you should be one step ahead.

“Failure is devastation,”

“Success is ideal,”

Step one is to find a job,

Step forty six perhaps, is to search for the meaning of life.

The philosophers are depressed,

As they chase the maddening question mark.

‘To know more is to be more miserable’,

And so we have been walking into this eternal doom,

Since the day we were born.

I hover between the extremities of nihilism and existentialism,

It is all for nothing, everything seems futile leading only to emptiness.

Yet it encompasses all, where significance resides,

While the “it” remains undefined to me.

If knowing more only leads to struggle,

Could enlightenment be ignorance?

Do the enlightened transcend knowledge and dwell beyond?

Will I ever seek enlightenment if I uncover the secret?

There is too much destruction,

There is too much judgement,

Despite being told not to judge.

Anything against the list of “goodness” is bad,

And mistakes are ill omened diseases.

Are we really architects of our own existence,

Or subjects in an experiment orchestrated by something bigger?

Even if we unravel the grand design,

I’m not sure things will be much different.

And though I long to be free from this cycle of inevitable doom,

I am guilty of being a hypocrite,

Because I still am asking for directions towards a meaningful life,

I am still yearning to know more.

And hence, the eternal doom prevails.

-Mauli Nautiyal