Not much

I say it is much better to have some kind of bondage forced upon (self inflicted suites me just fine) you before you can truly appreciate the way life and us mere mortals living it work and survive.

You live your life as if there was nothing in this world that you care about and then all of a sudden you have some purpose, something to look forward to when you retire for the day, someone to wake you up in the morning and say “Get up, you’ve got a big day ahead of you”. Someone you could talk to when you are feeling down and you don’t have anyone else to go to. Someone that is always in the back of your mind when you are doing something and you make sure that you do it right or else there will be consequences which you might or might not want/like. There has to be a constant driving factor for anyone, no matter how motivated or focused he is. It takes many a shapes; for some it’s the family and for some it’s the personal ego that factors in the motivation to forge ahead. This kind of feeling does have a positive boost and it usually helps you become a better person that you alone could ever have achieved.

But then all good things in this world come at a premium, and this one is no exception. It shows you how to live the life but the price you pay is much more than you could ever imagine. It takes your life away and you don’t even realize. On could argue that it took whatever it had helped create, but the harsh reality is it took the creation after you were used to the creation. Loss of something doesn’t hurt until after t has been lost. But on the brighter side you don’t realize because the payment you made is still there just not under your ownership. You are all hale and hearty and fine till the feeling lasts. I must remind you that the feeling doesn’t come with a refund policy or even a partial refund. It takes what you paid with itself and then you are left with no motive to get up, no eagerness to go to sleep and no reason to continue doing what you once enjoyed and certainly no reason whatsoever to want that feeling in your miserable life anymore.

But then some time passes (the duration depends on the fashion of the termination) and you realize that after all it wasn’t such a bad thing that it ended. You feel liberated and free. You feel that finally you can validate that the state you were in before it all began was not all that bad. It in fact was bliss and you never realized it. They say that you miss something or realize the true value of something only when you lose it or it goes away for a while. I say we have an exception here. You do not miss something when you have some alternatives. For example you won’t miss your Mercedes when you get BMW as a replacement but then when you get your Mercedes back and the BMW is taken back you realize that Mercedes was a much better car. The best part is that it’s yours and you could do whatever you wanted to do with it. With BMW you can’t do everything you wanted. You could drive it around and have fun but you could not take it apart even if you knew that you could put it back. It was not simply yours, you were just a caretaker. Nothing more, nothing less!

If only things were so simple! Sometimes you never realize what you have and what you lost until you really start examining and scrutinizing the very nature of your life. The big things are the easiest to realize but they are the ones that matter the least. These things can easily be replaced and more often than not they are not the ones you cannot do without. For example in case you lost your car you surely would miss it every time you need to make a trip but then it is entirely replaceable. You can go for an alternate means of transport or you might go for a new car altogether. Sure it is painful but it is not a thing that can bring your life to standstill. However there are things a person can lose night’s sleep over. At times I’ve seen people brooding over what seems to be a very small matter to me and I usually shrug them off and make some kind of fun. But the reality is that it is the small things that matter and then the small things that will make the life unbearable.

The small issues that constantly nag someone for example could be a simple case of flu to the son of a very caring mother, provided the son lives in another city and the only means of contact the mother has is a phone. The mother in question knows that the flu is not particularly dangerous and no matter what anyone does it is going to be there for the next 3 days. But I’ve seen mothers losing sleep over issues as small as news of a bike of same description as her son owns being involved in an accident in a different part of the city.

Although one might argue that it’s irrational on the mother’s part and the son might act annoyed that he was bombarded with calls just to make sure he was ok but somewhere deep inside everyone knows that it’s these things people will remember. Yeah when he talks to his friends he might brag about the expensive gift the bought for his mother or vice versa but catch the very same guy off guard and the thing he would remember the most will be the frantic phone calls trying to ensure that he was ok.

Same case is with the curious thing called life. Sometimes you are given something or you find something you don’t really need but you like and then you give up things which defined you to get to the object of your desire only to realize later that the object of your desire isn’t necessarily what you’d expected it to be. You feel like you have been deceived but you don’t have anyone to blame. You should and must blame your sorry ass for the goof-up you made.

You should have thought before taking the plunge, but hey we are all humans and to err is our specialty. We like chaos and unattended we tend to create as much chaos as we can, right?

So let’s take a bow to the chaotic world we live in and hope we continue to be what we are meant to be not what people expect or want to be (or what your perception of what people expect or want you to be).

Freedom in itself is a very contagious and extremely corrosive thing. Not many people exist in this world who can say that they lead a better life completely free and stand up to that claim. And by freedom I don’t mean the freedom as they portray in the movies or as it’s characterized in Democracy, I mean complete freedom to do whatever one wishes to do. A state where the person in question has no one to answer to but to himself and is free of all the obligations we as social animals don’t even realize we abide by.

Such a state would inevitably lead to a total chaos in the life of the man living it. From what I know I think I know no such person who might try to live in this type of dream world and maybe, just maybe continue to function the way they do now. This including all the people I know personally and all the people I have read about or heard about.

So all I can say is continue living the dream that we are free and …