The Long Night and the Cycles of Change
Everything is cyclical. What goes up must come down. Even good times don’t last.
We wish the bad times would run out of sand, and the good ones would stretch on endlessly. But that’s not the way life plays its game. Life holds no bias. For it, time is merely a parameter, a silent ledger keeping account of the irreversible, ever-unfolding sequence of random acts, natural or artificial.
Humans perceive time differently. Each person carries a private clock wound by experience, shaping their idea of “good” and “bad” times. There’s no universal version of either. What one calls prosperity may be another’s despair; what seems like a dark phase to some may bring quiet success to others. Society generalizes these experiences, but collective labels are always partial truths.
The world today has undergone a profound transformation. Few truly grasp the scale of complexity, scientific, social, or moral, that now governs our existence. Yet, paradoxically, many are certain they already know everything worth knowing. They hold fragments of knowledge and mistake them for the full mosaic.
And maybe that’s the reason there is no outrage. No one feels outraged when they see or hear about many vicious and cruel happenings, injustice, corruption and preventable accidental deaths around in our society, almost on a day-to-day basis. That is the uncomfortable truth we must acknowledge.
Outrage has become stratified, coded and selective. My outrage is different from yours. My outrage is true, yours is false. My outrage is righteous, yours is not. And finally I have the right to feel outraged while you don’t have it.
The change that everyone laments has been brought about by the very hands that decry it.
Hunger and greed have been the bane of human history, hunger for power, greed for more, and still more. These forces twist our shared reality, erode trust, and feed suspicion. Over time, paranoia has become the default state. “Us versus them” is no longer an ideology, it’s the air we breathe.
Gates left unguarded don’t merely let in the critters; they open passageways to darker spirits, the ones that once lingered quietly on the fringes, at the shadow’s edge. Now they roam freely, shaping minds and movements alike.
Night is here to stay. That seems the only certainty in uncertain times.
None of us will outlive it, whatever we do or fail to do. One day, every eye will close for the last time in that unbroken dark, entering the deeper night from which no one returns.
The question that remains:
Can one shorten the dark era?
Can one, by clarity or courage, make the dawn arrive a little earlier?
And finally, do we humans individually or collectively have the ability to do so?
©️ Shashikant Dudhgaonkar
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