Quarry

Every waking moment of our lives is ensnared in counting—count with a clock, calendar, chart, or benchmark! Many, however, stop counting at some point when they concede that the behavior of numbers is not consistent. There was no guarantee that the numbers were immune to exploitation, forfeiting their importance and consequences. Yet this leaves most of the users not callous but benumbed. Lifeless numbers become uncaring for the laws of the physical world because of the counter, context, time, place, and purpose of count – rendering a simple arithmetic operation into a gibberish pile. When this realization blossoms in their mind, they notice what has always been around them, but they pretend otherwise: things could be uninterpretable in consciousness! At the same time, they had been sleepwalking with bowed heads—lest the truth from the heart swell out with a scream! Everybody is desperate to avoid looking at each other to hide the heftiness of their unresolved feelings, frantically trying to stay afloat during thunders of contemplation. All their attempts fail only to swell up time and time again on every crease of appearance. Everyone becomes soaked in the shame of stripped sentiments. The struggle hunts them and makes them incapable of articulating their sensations, even if there were anyone to care about listening. Utterly anguished, they conspire ways to move on with impromptu yet impermanent logic for the time being. Their endurance of mind and body can withstand only so long before their knee or heart collapses from the consequence of the false sense of security they tended to all these times.

Aroma, too, is entangled in our lives, like counting. It changes depending on what we are doing, whether we find ourselves floating aimlessly in the ocean of time or simply pausing even from goose steps—intentionally or from the pull of a constraint. When we care about fleeting moments, a scent could leave an unforgettable imprint in memory. But the precious memento, the smell of our abode —regardless of how small fractions remain now, if they remain—can vanish in a blink. Everything around can become a mere penumbra only in remembrance. When the invigorating smell disappears to the slope of the horizon, we are forced to wonder if our loss of sensorial capacity has anything to do with our unwillingness, our resignation, to count, to entertain possibilities! We are left to plan merely for the moment: inhale, exhale, and repeat the loop until! The stubborn reality of impermanence shocks the soul. So, it crumples, and the mind erupts into outlandish ideas of the inferno: the disappearance of the sky, the partings of land beneath the feet, or the air becoming thick, heavy, and unbreathable any instant. All is possible, but we have deemed otherwise all these times!