Telling a friend about the recent much awaited developments of my life, I was struck by my lack of enthusiasm! It didn't come as a disappointment... I guess this is where Philosophy saves me. It got me thinking how everything in life is so ironic!
Right from the moment a child is born, he is thrown into a world of paradoxes... birth never comes without pain. A child enters the world; yet, we celebrate its cry. When a child, there is an almost urgent need to grow up. But when the child grows, everyone is left with a hint of sadness.
Our entire lives, we live for the future. Every act, every breath is for what is to come. Our existence is based on anticipation in entirety, in eternity. The wait... the wait for growing up, the wait for going to school, the wait for getting good grades, the wait for finishing school, the wait for going to college, entering the 'real world' as we are so often told, the wait for finishing college, getting a job, once again entering the 'real world' ... it's always a wait. We start one thing, in anticipation of its ending... jump to the next in anticipation of what lies after this.... if not a job, it is the next phase of life.... marriage, children, grandchildren. We're forever waiting.
The wait has become so intrinsic to man, both at an individual as well as a universal level, that we haven't learnt what to do when finally the wait is over and we have in hand what we had waited for. In not knowing what to do with it, we device something else to wait on.
Does our real life ever begin, or are we always telling ourselves to wait??? I go to school, when I go to college, I will enter the real world... Oh I finished college, that wasn't the real world, my job will be. I am at my job... it's not good enough, maybe I need a husband for my real life to begin... my husband and I are just two, I need someone to mother... now I am a mother, my kids have grown up and left the nest empty... their kids will fill it up. ... before we know it, we are left with nothing to wait upon but our end. A life wasted?????
True, we all need purpose in life. We all need direction, a sense of comfort in the hope for a future that's not empty. True, we need to work to make sure that it isn't empty. But are we extracting everything from our present to fill our future with?
I sit here, with something i have always wanted in life, with the knowledge that I just need to cross this one last bridge to be what i have always wanted to be... and I find myself thinking 'is this it' ??? I don't know what to do with it. I tell myself, it's just the last moment jitters, it will pass. I see my future fulfilling, but my present is hollow. There is no more wait... and without the wait, there's nothing for me to live for today.
Everything that man has ever done, or is doing today has been FOR something... Why is it so difficult for us to just BE?
I always thought that I lived in the present more than anyone else I knew. And I still stand by it. But even so, it wasn't enough... Words fail me right now, like they do everytime I am overwhelmed by the nothingness of this life... I guess it fits, NOTHING CAN DESCRIBE NOTHINGNESS!!!!!!!
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