By: Maahin Ahmed
It was almost noon and the traffic on the Main Mall was dense. Thousands of students shuffled between classrooms—some of them rushing to opposite corners of the campus, some brushing past in a flash as they swiftly crisscrossed their way around the crowd on skateboards, and yet others juggling their coffees, breakfasts, and cellphones as they walked to their first class of the day. The girl in the red scarf shoved her notes and books into her backpack, pulled the hood of her jacket over her head to avoid eye contact with anyone, and hurried out of the classroom to join the herd. Bits of overheard conversations, parts of the lectures from the day, and her own thoughts constituted a cacophony inside her head.
Her gaze fixed on the ground, she walked with quick, short steps and made sure to stay exactly within the straight lined pattern of the tiles that lined the pathway. The straight lined pattern was akin to how she had always understood life—orderly, with clearly defined rules and norms that everyone accepted and no one questioned. The straight lines on the pathway felt like the right way to follow; just the way she had always known the right path in life. Indeed she drew a fair bit of adulation from friends and family for her sense of clarity and judiciousness. She based her judgment of right and wrong on the unquestionable social, cultural and religious beliefs that she had grown up with. Conformity to preconceived beliefs was, somewhat paradoxically, empowering for her—following the rules made her feel in control of her life. It was as if the rules helped her retain her sanity by protecting her from daunting thoughts like finding a purpose in life or finding a meaning in existence. In other words the rules that she lived by had become an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. It is not surprising then that walking along that straight lined pattern was inexplicably comforting.
She continued to walk along the straight line, trying to ignore the now almost deafening voices in her head that told her otherwise. What she did not realize, as she plugged her ears to disassociate with the voices inside her head, was that when life has a lesson to teach, it does so in peculiar ways. Just such a lesson was waiting for her a few strides down the infallible straight line of tiles. The pattern of the pathway changed, the straight line of tiles disappeared, and instead the tiles were now set in place in a disorderly manner. The disappearance of the straight lines only increased her frustration—it seemed to signal the impending victory of those malicious inner voices that had been telling her to abandon the straight line all this time.
Perplexed and deeply uncomfortable though she was, she imagined her straight line of tiles within that disorder and continued to walk on it. Nonetheless, the physical absence of the straight line of tiles meant that she could not fix her gaze on the ground anymore. Hesitantly, she looked up and around; she started taking in her surroundings. Somewhat unconsciously the pace of her steps was beginnings to decelerate, and she observed the herd that she was a part of. The crowd, the motley crew that it was, was comprised of people of all colours and creed. She thought of all the different shapes and sizes of noses, ears, hands and feet that she caught a glimpse of, as people hurried past her. She was trying to consolidate her thoughts about the heterogeneity of the people around her, and the confusion and discord that inevitably accompanied that heterogeneity. At the same time, she could also feel a mysterious sense of harmony in the crowd—something that everyone had in common held everything in place. At this point she realized that individuals in the crowd were walking in several straight lines, some parallel, others intersecting, and each individual had their own imagined straight line—a unique version of the right path.
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