Narrow

This January, I set out to trek in a city named Sikkim, in India. For my acclimatization trek, I went to the old capital of Sikkim that was situated at quite a height. It was a foggy day through and through, and the views on the trail amongst the tall trees were breathtaking. Once I reached the sanctuary, I walked around a little and explored the area. I came across this quaint little path whose end looked ambiguous in its entirety because of the fog’s reign on the air. As I stood at the start of this path, trying to capture the ethereal beauty in a single picture, I had an epiphany: This path was life.

Or well, a perfect metaphor for it. Life doesn’t come with full visibility, and every time you try and look into the future, it turns foggy. However, even though you can only see faint silhouettes in the fog, it looks gorgeous. I realized that the same spot might not have been so special if there was no shroud of mist over it. That life is exciting only when you don’t know what’s coming next. There have been countless stories and plays written on how when someone tries to get their future predicted and lives by it, it ends up in a miserable failure.

The first example that had come to mind when I stood there was that of Macbeth, by Shakespeare. The witches that gave him his first prophecy told him ‘All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Glamis. All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor. All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter.’ This one ambiguous prophecy that seemed to shed light into the dense fog of his future drove him to the point of murder and into an insane frenzy of ambitiousness and sprouted in him a deep desire to know more. We humans, when confronted with knowledge about the future, seem to lose all rationality in the face of being tempted with one-upping fate. So, when Macbeth went to the witches, scared, for his second prophecy, he didn’t stop to think and he let the witches lull him into a false sense of security, which is exactly what we do.

They said that ‘Be lion-mettl’d,proud, and take no care, Who chafes,who frets, or where conspirers are. Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him.’ He believed he could never be defeated because that is what he wanted to believe. I realized that we humans were not given the ability to prophesize because we can not handle it with the grace it requires. It would drive us mad and change our very natures into ambitious, power-hungry monsters (and we’re enough of those as it is). It showed me that maybe life is foggy because we need it to be, and that the narrow path of life is hazy in the distance because that is the only way it will remain beautiful and awe-inspiring. The slow lifting of fog is the best way to live, and trying to hasten the clearing of the haziness to achieve useless clarity can only ever result in the haste blowing up in our own faces, because as they say: Haste makes waste.

*In response to the Photo Challenge ‘Narrow’ by the Daily Post <a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/narrow/”>Narrow</a&gt;