By Aarti Balaji
The first time I learned about free will, I felt empowered.
Agency is a seductive word.
The first time I learned about the lack of free will,
the ground beneath my feet disappeared.
I fell face first into the bottomless pit
of constant paranoia.
Floating faces of politicians and businessmen.
The rich coming together to conspire against me.
Like Wile E Coyote running off a hill accidentally,
looking down first.
Looking at the audience,
waving goodbye before falling.
The extra time granted by the rules of comedy,
in this joke of a life
is just the beginning of that bottomless pit.
None of your choices have ever been your own.
Who you think you are is who they want you to be.
Whatever choice you thought you made.
was limited by the choices they made available to you.
And the one thing you thought was your own?
'You' don’t belong to yourself.
Imagine your feet stuck to the floor of an elevator,
never realizing they are stuck.
Knowing your self really well
as a being of no locomotion.
You live your life in the box,
watching the floors scroll by.
Watching people come and go;
trying to keep track of them
and failing at it miserably.
You push random buttons now and then,
proud of getting to choose what buttons to push,
whose buttons to push;
your entire being is just a combination of these buttons.
You want to go to the eighth floor?
Too bad! Life is a six-floor building!
Dream, but realistically.
They gave you the Highly Realistic Handbook of Life
for a reason.
Hustle and grind but stay in your lane,
and always remember
it is an instant loss for the marathon runner.
Who violates the lines
that are supposed to keep them in their place.
So you continue to live your life in the lift,
not knowing of the ability to change speeds,
not comprehending sideway motion.
But possession of only half the knowledge
is twice as dangerous as the possession of none.
So they let you learn,
for their own benefit, of course.
And you do
and all is well
till they realize
that those who already have enough
may want to change the world too.
That hatred and greed may not be as intrinsic to humankind
as they did a great job of convincing us
and themselves of.
All it takes
is for you to come across one piece
of the puzzle that doesn’t feel like it was meant to be known,
because it probably wasn’t.
You’ve struck gold from a buried treasure
and it doesn’t come without a price.
A pretty hefty one if you’re looking
at a good university.
Onward journey of braving the odds
will lead you out of the backstage room
that you mistook for the actual stage all these years.
Freedom, here, might just be yours for the taking,
and it feels empowering.
It feels like finally being rescued by a medical team,
like being yanked free from that elevator of an umbilical cord.
Into a bigger world,
into the bigger world,
the one that those damn liberals
shot with beams of cuss words.
Emanating from fingers pointed at their faces
on the television in the living room during dinner.
Have been talking about,
the ones in the crowds marching on the streets.
In movies based on obscure news clippets,
from minor third-world countries.
With “difficult to pronounce names”
and “hardly distinguishable faces”.
Have been talking about,
And you will realize with awe.
And you will realize with fear.
That knowledge really is power,
that knowledge is like kryptonite to mind control.
Kryptonite that you now hold a piece of.
The real discussion on the question of free will
may now commence.