Sadness - an old friend

This has been a difficult week. Exactly one week ago, I got refractive eye surgery (colloquially known as lasik) done to my eyes. While the results have been remarkable, I still experience a lot of blurriness in my vision. Nights, in particular, are quite extreme. I have both light sensitivity (which means headlights really hurt my eye) as well as difficulty in seeing in poor lighting. On top of that, this week at work was somewhat rough and there has been some breakages at home. It has really sapped my energy and made me feel despondent yet again. Sadness - of that pervasive yet ambiguous kind - is back in my life.

Yesterday, I was sitting among some well-wishers, who were discussing how I've reached a stage in life where few things excite me. I do not know if they are right or wrong. Of course, I feel that I still get excited by the prospect of self-improvement, by grand projects like my book, and by the little joys of life, such as reading. But perhaps they are correct in the sense that I fail to experience (or at least emote) the way that most other humans do. Perhaps there is something amiss in my emotional compass. Perhaps there are notes that have been permanently erased.

Just like with my eye, I worry - despite all the rational things that my brain says to me - that I might never recover. Perhaps there are eyes that are just too weak and damaged to recover from whatever the surgery inflects on them. Perhaps there are souls that are just to damaged by visible or invisible traumas to ever feel as happy again. And then they seek happiness in familiarly and in comfort. Like cleaning of the houses. Getting done of the tasks. Pursuit of other world pleasures and successes. But these things fade out over time, and the joys that they lead to - as temporary as fleeting sand - just disappear.

But I have no choice but to keep fighting. Because there are people whose happiness is forever linked to mine - my parents, for example. I still remember how my first bout of depression back in college - an incident almost a decade old at this point - left them as concerned as they were confused. I guess one fights and continues because one doesn't want to let people like them down. 

And there's the other part of me, which says that we continue because we believe we can work hard and find out way. We work hard on our health, so that we can be in physically better bodies. We work hard on our careers, so that we can have more wealth and personal satisfaction. And we work hard on our relationships, so that we can have good times with loved ones in future. I don't know if the pursuit of happiness is ever truly successful, or whether it is one of those mirages that human society has created to enslave its people in the rat race.

But God - or whatever cosmic power/fate/chance there is - has been kind, and I owe it to that power/fate/luck to keep going. I often think about my own mortality, and the pointlessness of all of this. But if this is all meant to be pointless anyway, then perhaps the only good use of this life - and the time here on Earth - can be the pursuit of others' happiness.

P.s. a random thought just passed my mind. Tomorrow is my birthday. And I have a tradition of becoming reflective/sad on the day preceding my birthday. It's funny to see how some things never change.