I travel, I observe, I ponder the travails of men. In this age of gender polarization, I must clarify that when I say men, I mean mankind, not merely the male gender. Enduring long periods of isolation, experiencing the wonderful and inexplicable bitter-sweet truths of solitude, has helped me to develop a capacity to be an observer, a watcher, even a sentinel, if you will, of man and his lost, deceptively purposeful meanderings.
There are those who claim to have a purpose, a goal, to the attainment of which they devote their time and energies, their resources, their emotions and their wealth, with a single-mindedness that belies the transitory nature and the temporariness of their pursuits. None is mindful of the fact that he will leave behind no more of a gap in his passing as one leaves when one pulls a finger out of a glass full of water. Yet in this striving, the man, or the woman, forgets the things that matter and the only aspects of his/her life that will leave resonances, only to see them in the stark floodlight of the final moments before he passes into oblivion, with a pathos that is beyond measure, for realization has dawned only its too late; for the grasp on life is loosened, and the darkness has swamped the light of the eyes.
In their ambitions, people forget people.
They forget their families, their children, husbands, wives, friends, parents...
The lure that beckons them with an intensity similar to that which drives a drug addict leaves them in a somewhat similar condition. They die of overdose. The rich die because of their riches; the power of the powerful kills them. But it kills them long before they die; for they lose the most important things of life well before they are lowered into their graves, or the wood piled over them; long before the butter is placed on the forehead, and the garlands around the neck; their lamentations have begun far before the wail of it is heard, because the enticements of this world make people blind and deaf and unfeeling.
