It was now 11:54 a.m. and John was still staring at the screen of his monitor, hoping that he would, for the first time in ages, read about something positive, something nice that had happened to someone somewhere.
His hopes were, naturally, massacred rather quickly by the newsfeed of torrential negativism involving, what he now ironically referred to as the ‘regular mood- brighteners’ - a detailed ghastly account of the most recent murders and rapes garnished with a dressing of the ever-so- common and devastating civil wars.
‘Ah, yes…civil wars’, John thought. There was, of course, absolutely nothing civil about them. Take the war in Syria, for instance; John had long been wondering what it was that justified the ‘World Leaders’ to just sit there and watch whilst people were getting slaughtered as animals on daily, nay, hourly basis; the death now had now reached 20, 000.
‘Politics; that was what it all boiled down to at the end’, John thought. He had never pretended to like politics (or even understand it, for that matter); to him, it resembled a huge basket of snakes and lies that was being passed from one government to another as a rather frail and useless legacy that no- one really wanted or had a use for.
Or maybe they were fond of snakes; after all, snake dishes were considered a delicacy in many countries.
As for the lies; well, he quickly convinced himself that people could find them useful as lies had, for some time, been a rather popular currency around the world.
He was quite poor when it came to lies; but he was learning, and fast. The other day, when his son came back from yet another exhausting day of looking for a job, he looked him in the eye and told him that everything was going to be alright and that it was a matter of time before he found one.
John was quite proud when his son got his Masters Degree in Mathematics and Accounting; he remembered his eyes watering.
His eyes were, in fact, still watering; but it was not joy that filled them. His son had been looking for a job for over six months now but with the youth unemployment rate going over thirty- percent, it was getting increasingly difficult for a young an inexperienced graduate to secure a position.
It was times like those that made John remember about the days in which employers viewed inexperienced graduates as blank sheets of paper on which they could write.
He also remembered that employers used to write on those sheets with a pencil and erase the errors so that they could try again.
A mistake was not fatal; it was human to err and divine to forgive, they used to say.
‘Yes, back then, when something got broken, it got fixed and not merely thrown away and replaced…’ he thought, the nostalgia creeping up his spine.
But that was then and this was now; that much he knew.
He looked ahead, almost through the screen and past the window, growing ever so weary of the negativity that had permeated the very air around him. His look was somewhat dreamy; it was as though he had suddenly decided to adopt a completely different mindset to the one that had haunted him all day long.
He turned around and, looking through the other window behind him, smiled, to himself rather than to anyone or anything else.
He sat in front of the computer, opened a new Word document and started writing, as if in a daze…
‘It was now 12:51p.m. and Tony was still staring at the screen, cursing the world and hoping that it would stop raining.
That was, of course, a lie out of the basket; a lie that he had selected to suit his mood.
All he had to do was to look through the window to his left where the clouds had disappeared and the Sun was shining...’
At which point John did exactly that and it dawned on him that the world was quite a subjective place and reality was quite relative.
You either picked the rain or the Sun; the choice was, in the end, yours to make.
John resumed writing- yes, Tony was in for a ride; and so was everyone else.
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