One day, Meri called and proposed to buy tickets for a theatre premiere - Apocalipse comes at 6 pm.; I said YES, and at the very entrance of the hall I was somewhat disappointed when I read on the poster the play is written by a Bulgarian author,. I often find the modern Bulgarian writers too pompous and fake. And I was most pleasatly surprised, not by the actors or their performances; but by the strenght of the text; the qualify of the delicate, powerful phragments, intelligent monologue, undialogical dialogue, and an overall very nice, very concentrated lexical experience of meeting a beutifully written, thought-provoking, humorous, deep and well-balanced text.
However, it is not the play in its entireness that I took back home, because its phragmented nature did not leave a thorough impression of a whole. It was bit and pieces, thoughts and lightnings, provoked by the meaningful text. One of the characters confessed: "As a child, I was deeply aware that there was us, and there was them. We were the good guys, and they were the bad guys. And I was so relieved, so proud, so grateful, that I happened to be born on the side of the good ones." A rough quote, inspired by a childhooh to the east of the Iron curtain, which mentally clicked to many of the people in the audience. We all loughed. Because we recognized ourselves in these words.
Come to think of it, is not funny. The deep roots of hatred, of conflict, of despair and human unhappiness come from a division of the world into us and them, me and the rest of the world. It is so much easier to have an enemy to blame and judge, than to take full responsibility of our own reality.
If there is only "I", without any "they", then the I-self should be blamed for its overweight body, bad habbits of procrastination, boring job, unloved lover, lost dreams of being a famous Holliwood actor, cheap appartment with a bad view, and all those little, tiny, smelly misfortunes which pile up into a miserable life of lost opportunities. It is essentially flourishing from a psychologically comfortable notion that there should always be someone else to blame for all of it.
It is soooooo much more dificult to perceive ourselves in unity with the world, as happy little atoms of a whole, whose own power to create miracles drives the world ahead, and makes life a more livable experience.
We are losing our battles before starting them, because we are not aware that the greatest enemy we have is ourselves. The fact that we have disowned the control over our lives, and given it over to the anonimous "they", "them", "it", which we blame for every chance that we did not take, or we did not even consider taking. Fear makes us choose comfort over excitement. And converts us into lonely enemies of our beautiful dreams and our intrinsic right to the pursuit of happiness :)