Comfortable Torture

Writer's Notes :

Before you begin to read this piece of writing please note that this is an opinionative piece thus it is not based on any research or factual information. These are simply my inner thoughts being figuratively spewed on to paper.

What may have captured your attention so far is the title of this piece. You probably are thinking, comfort in torture ? It sounds a bit contradictory to me. So for those already contemplating how this story is gonna go, and just in what way this paradoxical statement is going to be explained, I invite you to spend not too long out of your day to read the next few pages, of what's going to be a quite interesting journey of thought.

As it is easier to write in the third person and also it would put off potential readers from viewing this writing as a scream for help. The upcoming story is definitely not based on my life or any experiences I have had. Believe the previous sentence at your leisure.

Comfortable Torture 

Manny, a lanky fellow who spends more time thinking of life than actually living it, is at his home one day. The day seemed as ordinary as what I imagine a rice grain feels like amongst the millions of other grains near it. The day is sunny, the heat is intense, it's the kind of heat that makes you wonder if it can even get any hotter. Manny, like most days, feels stuck within the life that he is living and apart from the fleeting moments of hope that is attributed to a bit of jungle fever, that stuck feeling never seems to change. He is not unique when it comes to this frame of thinking, this stuck feeling has become a cultural pillar, an unspoken but core value shared amongst people. This on the face of it sounds like a bleak ordeal, I mean a place where the majority of people feel stuck either consciously or subconsciously ? One would think that surely leads to a break down of the society in one way or another.

Before giving an answer to that more than reasonable thought, let's get back to Manny. He as previously described is lanky but not lanky enough to stand out in a crowd but lanky enough to be taller than most. He is shy, I mean super shy but has a temper that brews under the surface until it's ready to unleash it's wrath on whoever is nearest. He just turned twenty two years old and is already at the point where he is dreaming of retirement, if not retirement from a job, then retirement from the life he lives. He and his kind but slightly naive mother Candace live together in an upstairs apartment near a bustling town area which is part of the Caribbean island of St.Lucia. 

Manny and his mother spend most of their waking hours talking about ways to change their reality. This recently has not been confined only to their waking hours but it has now become day long conversations. Unintended think tanks occur at the climax of these talks, where frustrating ultimatums come to fruition and no real progress is made. It feels cyclical, years go by of the same pattern, I think it cannot be denied at this point that human patterns create the blueprint for which we live. I mean consider this, if you missed a day of brushing your teeth, you may not notice, let that go on for more than two days and it's guaranteed to become forefront of your mind. In the same way that if you intentionally or unintentionally break away from something you always do, it's at least going to have some sort of effect on you. Thus, Manny and Candace are feeling this burden of pattern heavily, both in the air filling exercise of talking about the same topics and also the pushing to break the reality they are facing. There are breaks though, they may be short and they may go before you are able to process them thoroughly, but we all get breaks. The problem seems to be that some people live one long break while others wait years and years for their one short break. 

This then raises another quite pertinent point about it all. Its unfair, to Manny and Candace, to you and I. Things are not layed out evenly, some manage to forge blissful patterns filled with lots of moments of joy and pleasure, while others, who usually represent the majority, are stuck trying to get away from the patterns they have been destined to create. All of this is bound to make you wonder what keeps the human race going ? To this I can't pinpoint a clear reason except possibly the madness that's within us all. Anyways, back to Manny and Candace, I keep getting side tracked here and I can't assure you that it won't happen again. Candace is a pleasant lady, a real genuine person who doesn't come along that often in this crude and bitter world. Her undoubtedly gentle nature is a double edged sword though as its not exactly beneficial in most scenarios, but one must admit she does stay true to herself, which is commendable at the least. She has financial problems, I mean who doesn't right, it's not bad financial problems but it's at the point where it's manageable but not fun. At this juncture some of you are going to read that and think "manageable and not fun" that doesn't sound bad, but I think looking deeply into it, there is a certain validity to that doctrin.

Who doesn't want to have fun ? Who doesn't want to live freely ? I think it's a common consensus that's what we all strive for. Then why is it once someone is gripped into one way or rather one standard of living, they struggle to change their reality. For instance, some say that hard work is the key and through hard work anything can be achieved. But what I would say to that is, that statement doesn't hold merit if all participants start at different ponts and with varying circumstances. No one in their right mind expects an Olympic Gold Medal Sprinter to not have an advantage over a hard working, up and coming track athlete, but we expect that put those two in a race, the up and comer can win through hard work ? I'm not here to say what's wrong or right but I think using logic we can see the obvious flaw in that ideology.

Let's forget all this ideology and belief chatter for a moment and give some more context to Manny and Candace. Candace is half way employed, as in she doesn't do a traditional day to day job, but she does get paid for what she does. She is a market vendor so her only chance of a steady income is based on the quantity of items she is able to sell on any given weekend. Candace just like her mother and her grandmother all worked in market like jobs. This again raises a point, did her whole lineage form the pattern of working at a market ? It does spark wonder within one's mind. I think it's not unrealistic to believe that in the same way Candace has tried repetitively to change her reality, similarly her mother and grandmother possibly did the same. Candace is not poor though or at least in a relative sense she isn't. She survives, takes care of her son and has money to take care of her basic needs. Again, this doesn't sound torturous or horrific, it just sounds okay. What's ironic about the description of Candace's life and the instantaneous thought in response being one of "it just sounds okay," is that if you gathered all of the people who live a "just okay" life, they would complain until your ears are begging for mercy. This again provokes the thought of ; then why are we so dismissive of the person who is "getting by" struggles?. For that question I'm inclined to think that the answer is down to sheer numbers. If the majority are "just okay" and "getting by" then they don't have much legs to stand on when it comes to complaining. Think about it like this, in a class of thirty students, if twenty of them are simply passing their exams, even if it's by the skin of their teeth, that's not going to be looked into, what is highlighted though is the extreme ends of the spectrum. The six under performing students are paid special attention or at least analyzed more. Additionally, the four top performing students are praised no ends because that's what we do as humans, we pay attention to what sticks out. Its all the more strange then that what most strive to be is "normal".

Talking about normality and students then, let's shine a light on Manny a bit more. He is a student, his shyness dictates that he doesn't want to stand out, he does though have an analytical ability that makes most pay attention when he starts sharing his opinion. In his university classes he drifts, in all senses his mind begins to float away from whatever mundane re-hashed topic is being explained and also his body as he begins subconsciously slouching in his seat. This is it, this is life, predictable unpredictability, thats the consistent thought that plagues Manny's mind on most days. He looks at life like a movie where he has seen the script, met the actors and knows the big ending that's coming up. Again, I would imagine to most Manny's life doesn't sound tough or painful, just ordinary. I think we can now see the re-occuring theme here. Ordinary doesn't pop out, ordinary is boring, ordinary is the middle slice of bread, it's just there and eventually will do it's job as expected. Here lies the issue though we strive for ordinary and we cling on to it in the face of anything painful or tough. 

This is because it's comfortable, look at it however you choose to, monotony is comforting, knowing what's coming next is easier than not knowing. Monotony is the essence of what life is to most modern people. If I can't have it all, then I definitely don't want to have nothing at all. People get a slight guilty buzz out of interacting with their fellow "getting by" counterparts, if one of those counterparts has one less parcel of frozen chicken in the fridge than they do. This is because even in this place of survival and not standing out, there is still that attraction to standing out, to being or at least feeling slightly better off than someone else. All in all it's torturous, yes I believe it is. We are programmed to hear the word torture and think of scary movies where the villain has held someone captive and is pounding nails into their eyelids as they roast them over an open fire. Yes that is torturous and it's not to be dismissed, that pain is most handy when it comes to the art of torture, but maybe, just maybe most of us are being tortured but in a less blatant way. 

Manny and Candace sound like over half of the Earth's population. An adult who works and a young adult who is in university. But if we delve into it, they just like the rest of the population, of this planet, have accepted comfortable torture. This is not because we are somehow okay with being tortured but moreso because we can't pinpoint exactly what needs to change or what we need to change about ourselves to cause a change. Yes we complain but we know our place deep down, we know we don't have it the worst but also we know we don't have it the best. Its interesting that most of us lie in similar positions in the various societies we live in but yet most societies are riddled with so many problems across board. I put this down to us being unaware of just how to change monotony, how to move up without the fear of ending up going down. This is not something taught to us, it's quite the opposite actually. Most parents share the rhetoric of " Be thankful for what you have, there are people starving out there" to that I cannot lay any rebuttle. What I can say though is that maybe if we looked at the boring guy or girl a bit more, showed a way to make their life feel meaningful and not run of the mill, maybe just maybe we could offer a path out of their comfortable torture. Manny and Candace sure would like one.