Monday, May 30, 2011

On enjoying life

The other day I saw a drunk woman, laughing on the steet, caring for nothing, and I remembered how I had felt with the glasses of wine I had had for lunch the past weekend. Alcohol has always been the standarized way to get away from problems or just, the socially acceptable drug. But I am not going to speak about wine and alcohol, but freedom. Coming back to the example of the woman, if we compare each other, I had so much more than her: A job, clean clothes, a college degree, manners, a car, (sorry for the uncategorized mixture) etc. But there was one thing she had and I didn't: Freedom. We have no needs and belong to a more or less middle class, but we don't enjoy life for being too concerned about the future. We care about social norms, and so we have to do what is acceptable.

Drinking will take you nowhere, I think. But not drinking will not give you guaranty of a healthy and happy life.

Life happens meanwhile you are making all the arrangements to enjoy it; once you've finished preparation, you have little time and energy left to enjoy it--that's living.

"Well," then, "don't do any arrangements!" one may say, but you quickly go the way back on your same footsteps when realising that you won't get very far with an empty backpack, empty of plans. With the backpack I mean our life experience, learnings and plans to achieve a better future. And we carry this backpack everywhere and it gets filled little by little; the more it keeps, the heavier it gets... and your hair gets gray... or you start losing it.

It's rewarding, though, to check it now and then and realise that some items, kept for such a long time, were finally useful. Those things we were told to learn and we never really valued, become useful sooner or later. We learn useful things in life, and so many times we overlooking or questioning their utility; but time demonstrate that the time invested doing those origami, or writing...

We like escaping and not facing the present we have created for ourselves. We care about the future more than about the present.

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