Trip to the pharmacy

People. All kinds of people: young, middle-aged men, women, kept scurrying in and out of the door. In search of their small, powerful buttons of magic, needed to alter, to fight the course that nature has bestowed upon them. 

A mother, carrying the weight of her sick child, entered the room, in great hurry it seemed. The child began to cry loudly, unable to bear whatever pain she was under. Eyes drooping and weighed down by worry, the mother made her way through the snaky queue, cutting it at times. No one was angered by that. No one complained. It seemed as if there was a tacit understanding of the newly developed situation among the occupants of the room. There was a young boy though, who heaved a slightly loud sigh of frustration that went unnoticed by everyone except for me. Too young, I thought; too young to understand the plight of a suffering mother. It wasn't hard for the rest of us to come to terms with the situation. We knew. Some of us were there before.

There was a power cut a little later. It did nothing to stem the inflow of people. I collected the medicines for my grandfather and was off. 

***

I can't help but find all this amazing. The human tendency to fight, to give everything to survive, no matter how stern, how severe hardships they come across. Wars have come and gone. Natural catastrophes have plagued and ravaged civilizations for long. Yet, here we are, through all that thick, through all those cumbrous times, ready for tomorrow. 

"All lives end. All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage."

It's a thing of fascination. Why? Because deep down we know the truth. The truth that no matter how hard we try to play the game of one-upmanship with life, there is just no winning. Yet we approach life with a panglossian view, not acknowledging the fact that the triumph we seek in life, and sometimes think we achieve, is just an illusion.