Look Up At The Sky

The sky always seemed so pretty to me. I can’t be the only one who always wanted to jump on the clouds when I was little. Whenever I looked at the sky, I would always look for them. Mesmerized, I would watch for hours on end, how pieces of white fluff would transition from a pig into a dinosaur. Everything else seemed like background noise while I would slowly fall into a different world altogether. Snapping out of that daze used to take a while. However, when I did, I started to wish for it to go away. I wanted to be a part of the real world. Once I started to perceive things, I started to wish to be a part of them.

As I grew, I got closer and more accustomed to a world where everything was instant. To give an example, in a world wherein I could either spend my time gazing at the clouds or watch manufactured entertainment through a screen, my mind would chose the latter over the former. It wasn’t that I was not accustomed to that world but rather once I had been given that choice, it became easier for me to lean over that option. Rainy monsoons and windy weathers seldom fazed me. The life of nature became more and more distant as I grew closer to the world of people. The irony is that this world managed to put me in an atmosphere where I was lonelier than I had ever been before. I fell into this routine of life where I didn’t really pay attention to what surrounded me and I would just look for petty moments of distraction. This lead to me getting attached to the concept of instant gratification. Naturally, I got sick of this life; I needed a distraction from my own distractions.

My imaginations paved way for me to dream of a place that was in stark contrast with my current bleak reality. I usually imagine my future self to be happier and more fulfilled. In my head, this future me has everything the current me does not possess. I think I like pretending to be unaware of the fact that who I am now is because of who I was, and who I will be in the future is due to who I am now. That tangent is perhaps what urged me to first notice my current self rather than envy my future self or nostalgize in my past self.

So I started gazing at the sky again. I started to appreciate it even more. But now it was harder for me to fall into the daze than to snap out of it. With my mind so preoccupied with other things which I refused to let go, I started to see the sky and clouds as more than just that. For a few moments, it helped me pull away from the treadmill of life that I dragged myself into.

The problem with instant gratification is that it pulls you in harder than you think. You are never able to fully get rid of that desire until you detach yourself from that environment. Flashy lights and loud noises have become so common to us that we barely notice them anymore; until they’ve become too much. Hence, even if it seems comparatively uneventful, I have learned to give myself a break every now and then to actually separate perception from reality and reality from a life that’s beyond closed doors.