The virtue of this city happens to be found in its vice.
Rain. Brussels rain, accompanied by an inescapable cold for the soul. A
bearable monotony. Bearable by virtue of pacifying you into accepting it.
The Sun is nowhere to be seen, and it feels like the length
of the buildings in front of the window elongate the breeze of monotony. The
water slowly dripping from a metal bar right in front of the window resembles a
cat sitting still, gazing at its prey, then suddenly jumping out at it. These
drops are the only things that startle the passive eye which allows this
gloomy, silent picture to engulf it in its demonic stillness.
A constant, bearable wait. Waiting for a call to action.
Looking for a heroic way to break out of the monotony, to break the ice that
separates the frozen from the moving. The distance between static and dynamic
is probably the longest. A decisive move that would set everything in motion… A
cold engine that would suddenly start, leaving the driver who forgot how to
drive utterly consternated.
A question arises:
what then? If we wait and let the wait weigh us down into a complete, ungodly
immobility, how will we be prepared to face the call to action? We remember
vaguely, in an intangible past, a voice telling us move, budge, push your gears. But when we came to the
realization that the voice was outdated, that there is new machinery, that we are the new machinery, we ceased to
listen to the voice urging us towards efficiency. We realized we are a better, upgraded
version of our parents and we decided to take that knowledge to the grave. And
with a pride. But missing the motivation to spin our gears out of lack of
external movement, we decide that our inactivity is excusable, and we retire in
a world of temporary comfort and self-delusion.
But the rain knows. The raindrop that suddenly drops,
startling our peripheral vision, is the call to action. The same rain that once
pacified us will soon shift poles and jump at the prey that stopped noticing
it.
In the collective conscience, only one question arises: what
then? The ones who ignore this question and treat it as an annoying pop-up will
realize the graveness only when it will be too late.
The end is not near. The end is now. The one who truly realizes this, his conscience doesn’t ask “what
then?”; it asks “what now?”
