After struggling with my nothing but volatile mood today, finally I am
able to barely start writing. This is my very first blog entry written in
English, so any comment or suggestion is completely welcome. What you are reading
now is not something new. I had kept the idea with me since I was in my second
year of high school two or three years ago. With more than a whole month of not
writing and the turn of events around me, I think of reviving that old “sketch”
buried somewhere inside my brain and put it here.
For me, this world somehow resembles its counterpart in popular Indonesian
late 70’s song “Panggung Sandiwara” (Theatre Stage). Personally, I like stories
in form of drama, movie, comic, novel or whatever format they are in. Observing
how a bunch of characters play their roles and sometimes imagining their untold
stories are somewhat a pleasure for me. That is, until I began to think that
the life I am living is also a story. For me, it is a drama that started at the
time I was starting to be able to remember things, somewhere around two or
three years old and will eventually continue until the point that I have to
resign from this world.
However, from another point of view my life-as-a-drama is not that
simple. For people around me, parts of my life have been part of their own
stories since before the time I have yet to be able to comprehend anything but
to cry as a newborn infant. For me, those stories were just a prologue to my
life told by my parents and people around their ages. I did not know for sure
how troublesome I was before I could reflect on my own actions. Yet, my
troublesomeness had taken part in many other “stories”. People live their life
as a whole for their selves, and as a part of other people’s life. While the ‘for-our-own’
part ends with us in the world, the ‘for-other’ parts might continue to live as
our legacy.
Back to current time, have we ever thought that besides being the
primary protagonist in our own stories, we play a bunch of different roles in
others’? We might serve as a secondary protagonist, as partner in crime, or as
a most hated number one evil antagonist. Sometimes we could grasp, but most
times we could not. Take a look at the legendary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work,
poor Dr. Watson, being a supporting role in his own stories. Consider Watson’s
stories as ‘just another stories’, without giving too much attention to their
status as fictional works. Sadly, yes, poor him, but that’s not the point. From
Watson’s (supposed) writing, we know his feeling towards his (supposed) close
friend, Holmes. However, we don’t really have enough insight on the other way
around: how Holmes thought of Watson?
Such an example could be used to see our daily life. We might have a list
of ‘friends’, a set of antagonist ranging from being an annoyance to be a
hated-from-depth-of-heart seemingly evil character, and a bunch of tritagonists
who spice our life up. However, we are also a part of other people’s life. We
don’t really know what are our roles is others’. I might have been a
strange-person-who-just-might-came-from-other-planet, an annoying club senior,
or even an evil coordinator who did something terrible the protagonist of that
story (whoever he/she is) and deserve the curse from everyone watching the
show. All of them without those protagonists really know what’s in the other
sides of my life unseen by them.
It is alright to consider that it is impossible to make everyone happy.
Just this might worth further thinking. We may have our own bittersweet damned
sad to euphoric happy tale of our own. But just remember that we do exist in other
stories, told by different story tellers, read and watched by different
audience. Having a set of our own good and bad is totally okay, but it might be
better not to antagonize everyone we thought as ‘bad’, as we (at least I
myself) don’t want to be an antagonist in hundreds of stories.
