What life has taught me

Author's name: Jalal Amin

Many years ago, I saw a silent Polish film, no more than ten minutes long. Its story keeps coming back to me from time to time, especially whenever I see someone from my family or acquaintance encounter something in their life that they cannot control or repel. The simple story begins with a view of a vast sea, from which two men, fully clothed, emerge, carrying together, each at one end, a huge antique wardrobe with three doors and a large mirror on the middle one. The two men walk towards the shore, carrying this wardrobe with great difficulty, until they reach the mainland in a state of extreme exhaustion. Then they begin to wander around the city, still carrying the wardrobe. If they want to ride a tram, they try to climb the stairs in the wardrobe amidst the crowds of passengers and the shouts of protest. If they get hungry and want to enter a restaurant, they try to enter the restaurant with the wardrobe, but the owner throws them out. The film only depicts their desperate attempts to continue living while carrying their heavy wheel, until they end up returning to where they came from, reaching the beach we saw at the beginning of the film, then gradually disappearing into the sea, where the water submerges them while they are still carrying the wheel. Since I saw this film, I have imagined myself and everyone I know as if each of us were carrying our own heavy wheel. We came into the world with it, spent our lives carrying it without having any chance of getting rid of it, and then died carrying it. It is an invisible wheel, and we may spend our lives pretending it doesn't exist, or what we think our choices are. I didn't choose my father and mother, or the type of family I grew up in, or the number of my siblings and my position among them. I didn't choose my height or shortness, or the degree of my handsomeness or ugliness, or the strengths and weaknesses of my body and mind. I have to carry all of this wherever I go, and I have no hope of getting rid of it.