Contemplating about contemplation

Today as I woke up, I found myself faced with yet another one of the untimely and unusually generous showers that Delhi has been blessed
with lately. Such weather usually puts me in a contemplative mood, and
today was no different. However, today I wasn't thinking about the 
paranormal, or reductionism, or even ways to convince people to 
make shrines in honor of Nietzsche. Today, I found myself thinking
about thinking. I was Metacognizing!

As I settled myself next to my window, with a steaming cup of coffee, 

and Peggy Lee humming a tune in the background, I found myself trying to fathom the need and importance of thinking to me. My mind has
always been a clock that never stops ticking. I have spent years as an
audience to almost involuntary thoughts that keep screaming in my mind.
Involuntary, that is what contemplation has been for me. But somehow,
during the last few months, it became a calculated task, almost ritualistic. Perhaps it was idleness. Or perhaps a necessity for me, 
considering the path I have chosen in my life. But, amid the transformation 
of contemplation from something intrinsic to me, to something that was
now a survival mechanism, I realized that I had stopped to enjoy it. It 
became work, like everything perhaps does after a point. 

They say Philosophy is either a luxury, or a desperate attempt at
justifying the desolation of life, for those who recognize it. Nietzsche said : "The great majority of people lacks an intellectual 
conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for 
an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated 
cities as if he were in a desert." 
I find myself surrounded by people who go through lives doing everything they
 should when they should do it, leading lives they way they have been told to,
 the right way. I always wonder if these people ever even give a fleeting 
consideration to why they are doing it the way they are. Do they ever sit 
and wonder how life would be if they lived it any differently, or even if there
 is a way for them to do so.
All these people, they seem so happy in their existence, so content with
obeying their parents without questioning their beliefs, so content with
their wives and husbands and children, living up to the conventionalities
that have been fostered for so many years. And then I wonder for myself,
for the need to complicate my life by questioning everything I see, by trying
to tread a path that is all my own. But then, I know there isn't any other way
I would want it. Life isn't about choosing what you want' life is about choosing 
what you don't want. And I believe, I have made an informed choice of not 
wanting a life where I can't question.