THE GAZE OF THE ABYSS

Tonight when I was waiting for the bus nearby the mall, a brief moment of tranquility grew inside my chest. For that moment, my mind was spared from thoughts, just the warm feeling of looking up at the moonlight, hearing people chattering, and feeling the breeze playing music in those dark greenish leaves. At that specific second, I was aware of my…enoughness, as a whole, not some wrapped-up patches of default brokenness rooted deep inside the generation, or a meaningless speck of dust floating in the infinite expansion of space and time, or even an unsolved jigsaw piece spending the length of its time reaching for the impeccability.

I interpreted that saying with the blind belief that the truth lay in the last half: "The abyss will gaze back into you". I viewed that as a concerned and truthful warning from the perspective of a human already lost in the battle with his demons: he did not become one of the servants of hell, but emptiness got him in the process. In fact, I didn’t think anyone could ever walk out of that battle and win, and even the best among us all, like Nietzsche, barely walked out of that battle alive; the void would be something he had to carry around like a battle scar for the rest of his life. I held those thoughts for years, believing if I avoided looking at the abyss as much as possible, I would be free from cruelty, sadness, pain, the unknown, and the void. "It wouldn’t find me here," I thought, like a child scared of darkness hidden in the closet.

I entered the second half of my adulthood not long ago, and this line in a poem has followed me ever since:

The lesson comes unexpectedly. I come to learn that all the fighting, all the gazing into the deep of the unknown, and all the fear are necessary. The same goes with gradually realizing that the abyss isn’t my enemy, that it is something that I should welcome with a warm embrace, not chase it away. The abyss will gaze into me. Yes, but is it really that scary, that harmful? Like a man in an old tale spending his life trying to play tricks with Death, only to find out Death was not there to take something away from him, but to enrich his time on earth.

I have come to know, slowly, that Infinity is not measured by time but by moment; Eternity is not an unmeasurable amount of time, but the process by which time becomes a moment.

And I am sure, at that very brief moment, when I was standing waiting for the bus to come nearby that mall, I was able to go back to the mere nature of existence: living.