Friday, March 23, 2007

Life, man


Living is breathing full, opening your eyes to the world around you and not wasting time on the trivial things. It’s standing tall, full of conviction with thought provoking ideas and a smile that isn’t limited to a particular time and place.
Living is going to bars with strangers who know as much about you as you know about them. Living is dressing with zest, owning art, eating good meals. Living is pretending you know what you’re doing when you don’t know anything for certain and what you do know seems to be changing all the time. Living isn’t about a plan, it’s about an ideal.

Living is knowing when to quit. It’s knowing when to call your bluff and take a plunge into the unknown. Living is about being everything you can be, and, the best you can be no matter who or what is stopping you. Living is knowing your wants and needs. It’s filling Maslow’s hierarchy to the nth degree.

My hand is numb today, numb to the pain; the throbbing muscle in my carpel that seems to be getting worse. My fingertips are vibrating and my right hand is usually purple in the mornings. I keep thinking it’s going to get better. I’m an optimist! It’s not. It’s only going to get worse. One day, when I least expect it, it’s not going to be better and I will have to make the pilgrimage into the doctors office and request the snip.

There was a time when my hand was fully functional. It was before I started working and realizing that life is about entrapment. Life is about taking a person so full of promise, so full of expectation and love for the world around him, and putting that person in situations where he no longer has a choice. We have to beat them down. We have to manage and control, we have to take the people who grow up with promise and let them know that it was just a dream.

Living is rolling with the punches. It’s letting people take advantage, or even letting people lie outright and noy even skipping a beat when you find out. It’s about shedding all the moral righteousness that people wear on their sleeves. It’s about seeing past everything and finding a place that no longer affects. It’s about become cold and numb to the nuiances in life and becoming totally selfish and absorbed in your own pleasures.

The real world is a nightmare and as much as we want to wake up, as much as we want to acknowledge that this is just temporary – “I’ll work for a couple more years, save up, then I will do the things I want” – it’s just a dream. It’s hope that we all have; hope that we hold on to; we want purpose. It’s ok though if you are content. Obviously I have given it much more thought as you.

I want to live. I want to consume as many positive things as possible. I want to meet as many interesting people as I can. I want to smile constantly, live life to the fullest, pass each day knowing that I did as much as I could and it’s not lost. It’s never lost in my eye. I want to be surrounded with color, compassion, love; I want everything. I want my soul to be filled constantly with no downtime.

Want destroys perspective. I know I want too many things. It’s been with me all my life; I think it’s because I missed out on so much when I was younger. I was too patient, I was too timid, and I didn’t find strength and conviction until a much later age. I think I was 23 before I snapped out of it. It being everything in my line of sight, everything in my life. I didn’t see until a much later age, you know. And now that I see the beautiful, the promise, I want so much more.

I am in my office and looking from office to office, noticing my co-workers. I feel sorry for them, caged up so. Some are young and full of energy. They are fresh out of school with a “I will succeed attitude”. They want it so bad and they haven’t been in the working world long enough to see. They haven’t lived their lives. And, yeah, I know I am projecting. I haven’t lived my life. I am totally being a hypocrite as I sit here and judge them. Sometimes I feel as if this is all I know and will ever know. As much as I complain I have this great fear that five years down the road I will be doing the same thing: critiquing everyone but myself.

I feel anxious about succeeding in a mediocre world and I’d rather live.

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