The Dark Side, as famously dubbed by Star Wars. Everyone has his/her piece of malevolence trapped inside thick walls of pretense for social propriety. We are and always will remain strangers even to ourselves. We do not know what we are capable of doing when we fail to accept the side with which we are afraid to show. It’s a sore burden to have to carry a load that is tightly harnessed on our backs, and we are inept on removing it. We are evil; but we are not the devils. We are capable of sinister things, but we are cosmic kilometers away from being the cursed one. We may endanger the people around us with our secret contrivance against the world at large, but we are mostly, definitely able to go beyond our primal selves.

I’d be vehemently chastised for adamantly holding on to the tenet that man is a genetically superior animal. We are smarter. And I believe that is the only ace we have got against any other animals walking the floating surface of the earth. And just like any other animals, we have primal instincts. We are governed by instincts that augment our chances of survival. Man, after all, is subdued by the ubiquitous laws of self-preservation. We have evolved to put ourselves at a vantage point, but that wee piece of primal consciousness still lurks within the darkest corners of our being. We kill to eat, hence we are predatory. We defile the one and only place that supports our existence; we desecrate nature, plunder it with its treasures, and maraud the string that connects everyone on this planet; all these at the expense of our gratification and lack of self-contentment. We deny others there due of unadulterated existence to satisfy our avaricious desires. We compromise the fragile balance of nature to propel our self-proclaimed altruistic causes. We move forward at the expense of genocide; we are murderers, and that is our dark side. The primal consciousness of an animal lurks unnoticed within us. If we deny ourselves the awareness that we have that within us, we remain as men (women). We cannot unclench our fists if we do not know we are clenching it in the first place. But as shadows dancing at patches of ground, they are not all that. When there is shadow, subsequently there is light. If man has a side that wreaks of hellish havoc, man has a side that glows with scintillating grandiosity. We are not only men, we are human beings; capable of kindness, compassion, charity, laughter, care, love, and many more others.

We are capable of thinking, of being aware that the world is temporary; we are temporary. We are able to destroy, but we are more than able to create. That behind the dancing shadows, there glows an omnipotent light. There’s still hope for the human race. Hope should not fade. It should continue to cudgel every regret. We are not the devil. We are merely puppets of the perpetuating battle between good and bad.

(Scratches the attention-deficit itch that has been plaguing his feet.)

On another note (since I don’t want to sound so formal writing about bland topics such as the one on top), I have noticed an “ant march” on the wall of my room. They have been going at that for months now, and I just could not find the conviction to halt their way. I don’t want to be so rude to stop their established way of life. It never ceases to amaze me how robotic they are at following the line. They go by the thousands and still no one gets lost. Some may stray the line, but they still manage to find their way back. Ants are the exemplar of hardwork. They work for subsistence. But the one question that niggle my thoughts is that are they even capable of living? Not merely surviving, but living. They seem to work as if tomorrow is just an escaping idea. Do they encounter the dilemma of fitting in? Obviously they do not have any problems of divergence, since everybody seems to heed a higher authority. Do they get depress when love doesn’t work out? Do they even love? Questions leading to more corollary questions; endless stream of inquiries that will never be answered. Frustrating to say the least, answers always seem to evade those who continually seek it.

The world is big, simple, but never easy to understand. So is man. We should learn to co-exist with everything else. As shadows depend on light, man should stop fantasizing and wake up to the reality that we depend on everything else. We are merely custodians to the artifacts created by a being beyond understanding. Live and let live!


*photo by loi brodeth
*camera by my bebe, bernz bernales