In a provisional land, you wait for something that never arrives

Essentially, you'll repeat what others are saying and hear what they are hearing. "Seeing" is irrelevant in times of blind approval. What matters is keeping your blindfold on tightly, no matter how tempted you are to yank it off.

Now, if it happens that you do see something that you shouldn't: pretend to have seen nothing. Turn your gaze to another time, another place, another planet.

A master of harmony

If you suffer – if you witness poverty, hunger, and crises – you should practice your lines more diligently. The script has your answers. Say the country is witnessing a rare wave of prosperity and lives in enough abundance, glut, and sufficiency to spark the envy of the world's most industrious cities.

After all, you wouldn't want to be branded as someone who miscalculates or misevaluates. You wouldn't want to break the status quo and be labelled as delusional or, God forbid, an enemy, an idiot, or a madman.

What, who, and how long you're waiting for is above your pay grade. Leave that to the people in charge. It's alright if you don't know who they are. It's okay if you do know who they are, too, as long you ignore what they do. It's their business — and their business alone.

You're a master of harmony, always willing to wait, just like the others. They're quiet, so you're quiet. They clap, so you clap. They scream, so you scream.

In a line-up, no one should be able to pick you out – you're identical to everyone around you. Don't let your emotions get the better of you, or you'll break the spell.

A cog in the machine

Remember: You're stamped from head to toe. It's not your place to tamper with that stamp. It's embedded in your flesh, your heart, and your brain. In fact, it's coded into your bones, dreams, feelings, and thoughts.

You're a slave. So are the others.

Together, you make up the cogs of a machine that moves on autopilot to a pre-established rhythm. With one press of a button, "they" can halt your operations entirely. The machine is well-oiled, after all, and it will wait patiently to be switched back on. It will wait with all the conviction and enthusiasm in the world.

But between calling waiting "deferral" and deferral "waiting", something starts to eat away at your soul, gnawing at your flesh, clouding your vision, and jumbling your words.

A wetness lingers in the corner of your eyes. Against all odds, the wind and water erode your surroundings. The roses and leaves begin to dry up. Eventually, you begin to erode and die, too.

Humiliation will begin to creep in on you, and it will carry with it the heavy scent of decay, which will attach itself to the lining of your nostrils, your throat, and your guts. It's so thick that it coats your voice and stifles it, too.

Outside, the same scent lingers on the walls and sidewalks.

Your words disappear. So do your fingertips. So does your soul. Your whole world, rotting and disintegrating.

Keeping up appearances

But throughout, you must defer your blood, sweat and tears. You must keep your chin up and tilt your face into the sun, competing over who can shine brightest.

In provisional lands, you must blend in with all that's been postponed: culture, life, death and consciousness itself.

In all these matters (that will be dealt with at a later time), you must pretend to wait. You must say that waiting is more beautiful than miracles. It's more valuable than the treasures that await the hopeful optimists who will eventually triumph over despair, nothingness, and frustration.

You must say that you are waiting, and you must manage that waiting well – taming it, shaping it, embellishing it, and colouring within its lines.

You must corrode from the inside but appear whole on the outside. Store your bitterness in the deepest wells of your broken spirit and bask in utter happiness.

Bite back your sorrow, swallow the taste of death, and force your mouth into a radiant smile.

Not alone in your home

In provisional lands, you must wait without knowing for what, or until when. For the safety of the country, your own safety, and the safety of all of the moving parts that are advancing in every direction – even if you don't know what they are or in which direction they are going in – you must believe what is said, and what isn't.

With all the strength and faith you can muster, you must boast of the power and glory of these trampled lands, and the supposed joy of its righteous people. (Never think of these people as insects stuck in a hole of postponement or a trap of waiting.)

In such conditions, even your home is compromised. You must be careful to open and close your doors tightly; no one should hear them creak or click shut. Any sound can give you away.

Even standing alone in your room or on your balcony can carry hidden meaning. It can be interpreted as a bad omen by fortune tellers and speculators. Your solitude, in itself, can expose your intentions and thoughts.

You must be convinced that your house is inhabited by someone other than yourself. Who that is doesn't matter.

Even as you sit in a café with no companion, you could raise the eyebrows of those who engage, without you, in the game of Divine Comedy with the "earth's Gods," in the words of Gibran Khalil Gibran.

In provisional lands, you are a part of a whole, and a whole without parts.

In fact, the part is not a part and the whole is not a whole. Because everything is incomplete in provisional lands.