The old souls’ chronicles 6 : the great calm restored 15 November 2025
Courtesy freepik.com
Tony caught Aron’s body just before it hit the ground. He had not thought it would be a good idea to leave Aron all alone but he had had to agree to give him the possibility of processing his grief fully on his own. Although most of the youngsters after his generation had foregone their right to experience fully emotions, especially the negative ones, he had felt that Aron was different and deserved a chance to process his feelings fully even though it was grief. Tony had never thought that the chancellor’s suggestion of a new world without too many emotions was a good solution. The chancellor had made it seem like it was the heightened feelings, especially the negative ones that caused all the problems in the world like wars, distorted enactments of feelings such as with psychopaths or sociopaths, all the terrible things that criminals would do, animated by anger, hatred and all other negative feelings.
With the first generation, it had been a mass administration of drugs coupled with lobotomy-like procedures in order to dull the new generation’s feelings and reduce their emotional responses. A generation later, it was mainly drugs and after that, it was through processes akin to eugenics. Tony and his wife Hegat were one of the couples that had chosen to stay the way they were, able to emote freely and increasingly getting a select status of being called “the old souls” because they were the last of the old generation that was able to freely feel and express their feelings. They never gave in to all the solicitations of lobotomy or drug use to make their emotions softer, but preferred to stay the way they were, capable of feeling the whole range of emotions up to their most extreme levels. In fact, not only did they retain their feelings but they also developed the skill of conveying such feelings to others through touch and worded expressions.
Tony looked at Aron. So much for creating a generation of youngsters who did not feel too much or seek to have negative feelings he thought. Here was one of those youngsters, one of the first generation that had had negative emotions removed both by procedures and drugs, yet he had some of those negative feelings left and wanted to experience one of the stronger more negative ones such as grief. The remainder of his generation only felt a sense of justice and equanimity and the chancellor had created generations of obedient fun-loving youngsters who only lived for the mild fun of a certain series of acts but did not care for what was happening at the top nor ever want to contest any of its rulings. This was how you governed easily a population, he thought, by creating them incapable of strong feelings.
Tony pressed his palms against Aron’s temples and started massaging them while speaking to him soothingly about love and how it alleviated all negative emotions. He told him that even though his wife had died, the love she had for him had never died and was present all throughout their home. He told him to try to gain access to these feelings. With a small swipe of his hands around the room, Tony collected the feelings of love that were still present throughout it and passed them onto Aron’s temples and his occipital region. Aron reacted with a shiver and a smile started spreading across his lips before he opened his eyes, slowly gathering the scene around him. His eyes met Tony’s eyes and tears welled in them as he realised Tony had saved him. He felt the love swarm into his chest and fill him with a sense of relief and happiness. This was not the fun feeling that most of his generation experienced but a full blown sensation of happiness. Inside him a great calm was now replacing the relief and happiness he had felt. It was as if nothing could ever break him again and he felt like he had evolved in such a short time into a different kind of being, stronger, more resilient, more capable of feeling things almost like the old souls.
"Once again" - Short Dance Film / Stefano Terrazzino & Paulina Biernat / Music: Abel Korzeniowski
I move quite regularly and can almost say that moving has become a habit, a treasured activity that forces me to reinvent myself while I reinvent my surroundings and ensure that either I adapt to them or they bear with me as I coax them into more habitable spaces that yield the kind of experience I wish. Every time I move, I unravel a trove of memories that come back to me like a storm or like a calm summer wind, depending upon how they were made and what they were made of. Some memories transcend the place and time they were born into and stay rooted like a hundred year-old olive tree. Their traces are like its shimmering leaves, spreading the feelings they once gave rise to within our bosoms and etching their particular aroma within our hungry nostrils as their intricacies play within our minds.
I sometimes feel like the olive tree itself, my memories shimmering within me and shedding light onto the pathways they forged within my mind. I am a tree of memories, the good and the bad, all laid out for my inner eye to see and my guts to experience all over again. I carry them sometimes into the open so I may pour all over them again my keen mind, eager to make sense of what could sometimes be senseless or to feel again what I had suppressed before for fear of not being able to overcome the deep foreboding that overcame me at that time. I am like a tree, yet unlike a tree I am unable to root myself into any ground. It seems like my gypsy spirit always wants to soar above the ground and visit yet another distant land, another unexplored part of the world. I sometimes wish I were an astronaut, able to roam the Universe rather than just the Earth.
I wonder if it is the fact that I come from a multicultural, multiracial background that makes me unable to take root anywhere. I feel no kinship to any of the countries I was born in or originated from by way of my lineage. More than a citizen of the world, I feel like a citizen of nothing, just a mass of energy floating here and there, never settling anywhere more than 6 years at a time in general. The longest I ever lived somewhere was in Dubai at Al Thanya Street where I remained for 8 years from 2010 until early 2018. For some reason, if it is not I who want to move, circumstances push me to make a move for somewhere else to stay in and I have never been able to stay in one place for 10 years or so. Every time I think I have found the place I want to stay in, I am out of there before the usual 6 year chime. It is as if I were a home Cinderella where the home would become a pumpkin at the end of the 6th year and my slippers would turn into bristles, causing me to strip them off and get going. So once more into the fray, this was again my moving day…
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