A Life of Fear
The irony is that, we live our lives backwards.
Consider our youth. We waste the precious time of our innocence by hoping for the day that we can be older, and wiser, and just tall enough to be able to reach the cookie jar, get on the roller coaster, drive a car, get a credit card, live on your own, etc., etc. We don't get the respect we deserve. The "adults" don't consider our opinions or aren't interested in our passions, and seem to smile and nod politely at whatever thought we manage to coherently express amid the jumble of distractions that threaten to derail our fragile, very impressionable train of thought. We are easily influenced, easily coerced. (There's no "H" in coerced! Imagine that!) And then we really grow up.
This is a central period of our lives. We have achieved adulthood! But at what price? First it's figuring out how to spend money frivolously on things we "need" while being frugal. (A practice that college students everywhere are still trying to puzzle out) Then it's graduating, and finding out that jobs AREN'T aplenty. Your skills are not important to anyone but yourself, and you can't seem to convince anyone otherwise. Once you DO find a job, you consistently second-guess all the choices that, when you were younger thought that when you were older, they would be a lot easier to make than what adults during your youth made them out to be. (And if you can puzzle out that sentence, good for you, keep on reading) College loan payments, mortgage payments, car payments, credit card payments. It goes on and on. You find yourself wishing for a simpler time... when thinking about what excuse to use when being asked about where you learned the "F" word from was the biggest worry in your day (and why you said it to the teacher), all the while wondering when you were going to figure out what the FUCK the "F" word meant. (Also during the adult years, you realize that inventing expletives was mankind's greatest achievement, not harnessing fire.
Finally, people wait for us to die. But we're not ready. We are passed our prime, but we don't really believe that. We say things like "Youth is wasted on the young." We become those adults that had, when we were younger, glossed over our thoughts and opinions in order to reinforce things that they had already learned and didn't want us to repeat, but we had to, because we're all the same. No matter how old we get, we can never stop living in the past. Hindsight is 20/20, and people would rather see clear behind than face the uncertain future.
When we are babies, we are not aware of our mortality. As pain and KNOWLEDGE is introduced into our lives, we create fears within our minds that, while enabling us to live longer lives, have a way of debilitating, and retarding our adventurous ways. The closer we get to death, the more time we spend trying to put it off as long as possible. Fears are justified as healthy, to keep us alive longer. But really, how long are we going to live? Life requires death, and vice versa. A baby, that has potentially a longer life span to look forward to than a 90 year old man has no idea of how "lucky" he is. And by not knowing, he does more to figure things out than someone who has a life-time of knowledge, and yet does not want to accept death as a fact.
A fact does not require belief to be true. Once we can accept death as such, I believe that we can do greater things than anyone could have ever over-thought of.
posted by abobobibim at 6:28 PM
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