What To Keep, What To Abandon

Depending on one's situation and future, one can be faced with one of life's most harrowing choices: what to keep, and what to abandon?

To those living an easy life - supported by one's environment - nothing has to be abandoned. They just float along on the current and no difficult choices ever have to be made. It's only for those who are torn from this easy current and forced to face the brutal, unforgiving side of society that this choice becomes impossible to ignore.

What to keep?

To be human means being both emotions and feelings as well as intellect. The latter helps one survive, the former is a liability; to be discarded gradually or immediately as the situation calls for it. To survive means being steel: cold and unforgiving. It does not co-exist with the softness and gentleness of a protected life.

And yet one needs both to remain human.

What to abandon?

Abandoning emotions and feelings can be most desirable. There are only two states one can be in: capable and incapable of feeling emotions. Leaving oneself even a small bit open to emotions means opening oneself up to hurt and psychological trauma. There's no middle road. Capable or incapable.

Yet one is still human.

To survive is to be steel, with an inlay of fine, blood-red webbing; a solid core pervaded by hurt and agony.

To survive is to be steel, once one gives up on being human.


Maya