Darkness

(Sajeelah Iqbal Rana, Lahore)

Darkness, what does this word mean? What do we actually mean when we say that we have darkness around us? Commonly it depicts helplessness, grief, fear or even regret and hardships. But in reality it has got an entirely different meaning.

When the lights are off and we are unable to see all the worldly things, it provides us an opportunity to seep quietly in to our inner world which is something out of this world. There we meet our own selves, the real person hiding inside us. It’s in fact the black color of darkness that colorizes our world. When the blackness of darkness peeps in to our inner world, it splits in different colors and makes our world beautiful. So, the blackness of darkness that communicates despair to people depicts the beauty and light of our inner world. In darkness, we can feel our own presence. Actually being busy all day, doing worldly things, following the same boring routine everyday, meeting different people take us away from our selves. We don’t get time to think about what we want to think, we don’t get free to feel what we want to feel. So when darkness gathers, it gives us an opportunity to think about all that we want to think and our imagination wanders like vagabond. We feel, we think, we sense, we get to know what actually we are because at that particular time we are free from all others those influence our thoughts. Nobody is there to affect us. So, it makes us close to our selves, it makes us feel like an individual who has got his own point of view, his own thinking and even a world of his own.

Darkness is freedom, extreme liberty. We can think whatever we want to, we can feel everything according to our own perception. Our imagination roams around and we create a world of our own choice but when we open eyes again the facts like fate, dependence, materialism are there to make us feel alone and helpless. Darkness is not just a time period of turning off lights, it’s an atmosphere, a complete environment which makes us able to think and feel. Even thought when there is light, we can feel darkness to find solace and comfort and we usually do this when the world becomes unbearable for us.

Darkness provides us space to respire freely. Among the cruel crowd of people in the world, nobody gets enough space to breath. Breathing doesn’t mean inhaling and exhaling. Breathing means getting life in this messed up world. So, our dead and rotten mind gets alive and freshens up when we spend time with our selves in darkness. Darkness has got a very unique and soothing feeling in itself. Just imagine that how good it is when there is not enough light to see roofs and walls. It makes us feel that we are in an endless territory. We can’t feel the boundaries and limits and it’s an awesome feeling to be free from all worldly barriers.

So, darkness is a real companion, which is not less than a blessing for us. It’s our secret keeper. The things which we can’t reveal in front of anybody, we reveal them to darkness and it’s a great confidant. It makes us feel what we are. It helps us understanding our selves. We see things in light but feel them in darkness. We meet people in light but darkness tells us that what they are for us. Darkness completes our world, our inner world so we are incomplete without it. It’s a part of us and our souls.

I got a poem from one of my old friends, that is about darkness:

My life is like a prison, my cage is this world,
my soul is being captured since the day of my birth;
why I am trying to leave, the comfort of this place,
its better to sit in the dark, then to be burnt away.

Here I live unnoticed, and that’s a great blessing,
but still this heart is moaning, for going to the land of rays;
desires of heart are vindictive, like vicious destiny,
both of them forces, human race to pay.

When sun and stars and moons are moving all the time,
then why do these obscured forces don’t allow men to sway;
I m living in the darkness, surrounded by million fetters,
Oh! I can’t reach those alluring fires, and there is nothing left to say.

Sajeelah Iqbal Rana
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