The Length of a Cigarette — Struggle
This post was first published on Medium: https://medium.com/@marketingholmes/bir-sigara-i̇çimi-uzunluğunda-mücadele-1aa73b275636
If I stop, I fall; if I fall, I lose.
Where is the meaning of life hidden? There’s a saying I love: the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
Right in front of the cave’s enormous mouth, I look at the shadow cast on the cave wall by the sun beating down on my back. Getting here was harder than I can tell you. Steep hills, sharp rocks, wild animals. Every inch of my body is covered in the scrapes of this struggle. Like someone shielding a wound that has only just scabbed over, I shield my steps from the chance of deeper wounds.
There’s no knowing what the cave I’m about to step into will bring, but of this I am sure: some of my wounds will bleed again, and my arms and legs will fill up again with the scrapes of struggle. Maybe that is what keeps me from entering that cave, from struggling, from taking even one more step. We shield our wounds, our pain.
But what if the cure is in that cave too. What if the road known as darkness is our road to the light. What if the journey into our own unknown runs through the deserted roads and narrow passes of the cave called life. We always fear the unknown. We hide things, we hide ourselves, we hold back.
I have two options in front of me: either I’ll let myself go with the flow and, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, whatever comes my way, whatever crosses my path, I’ll accept it. I’ll say okay, that’s it, I chose this path, my lot is my fate, I accept it. The other option is struggle.
Ah, struggle, what a hard thing, what a beautiful thing. Running, getting tired, crying, taking up smoking, lying from morning till night in a 2-square-meter bed no different from a coffin.
Ah, struggle, what a hard thing, what a beautiful thing. Being scared to the bone, until your hands and feet turn to ice.
Ah, struggle, what a hard thing, what a beautiful thing. Pacing the city’s empty streets on mornings before the sun has risen, getting lost in a city you’ve never known, or flying a kite on a stormy evening.
Ah, struggle, what a hard thing, what a beautiful thing.
