NEVER WAS A WHERE

I'm writing because if I do anything else, my brain will just continue to nag at me and kill whatever it is I'm trying to distract myself with. I don't know why these things bother me so much.My stomach feels cold and I'm fiddling with my computers trying to distract myself from this sudden unease.

It's ridiculous, but I feel this way because I just watched The Office. I like The Office; it's a funny show. I laugh while I watch it, but each time I finish an episode, my heart sinks and I get this weird depression where I can't stand the thought of seeing another one, while needing to see another one in the hopes that something will change and things will get better somehow. She'll quit and work on being an illustrator. Why is being an illustrator a pipe dream? It's just as possible as any other job. Why is being a therapist a pipe dream and a waste of time?

Sure, it's just another job, but it's something besides the cubicle coffin and corporate ladder that you hang yourself on, because your tie got stuck on a rung a while back and each time you take another step up you pull it a little tighter around your neck, but you don't even notice because the air's getting thinner so slowly that you just fall into it comatose, unaware that you've been killing yourself, eating away at yourself and now it's all gone and you're at the end of your rope and there's nothing but ladder and ceremony left.

It frightens me. You see, the mind is plastic, and allowing yourself to buy into it even for a moment will get you in that place long enough for your mind to bend around it and accept it, validate and defend it until it is you. It is death. There is nothing to be created there, nothing to be gained; you can live an eternity in a place like that and never have existed at all. In all that time you could have affected no one, created nothing, learned nothing and left no mark. You would become a non thing.

Every now and then I question myself and my life, and worry about the way I've done things. At any point when it gets to me too much and I beat on myself too hard, I take a look at the alternative and it all becomes clear to me again. Failing miserably while trying to do something great is worlds better than succeeding at what is expected. People don't really expect much, and if I did do things the usual way, it wouldn't be terribly difficult. Everything is already set up for you to succeed in that manner, but when you're done with it, what have you done?

You haven't tried to do anything really. It's difficult to set a new grain and to strive for things in an unusual way, in ways even your closest family can't comprehend, but it's the only thing worth doing. I'm not interested in having someone else's victory or success. I'm not interested in getting where other people have gone and I'm certainly not interested in doing it the way they have. I respect people who have succeeded and I'm smart enough to take a good look at it and try to understand it, but I don't want to walk in anyones footsteps; I want to make my own. I don't really care if anyone wants to follow in mine, but I'd like to set out and discover something, look at life in a different way, solve problems with my own fledgling mind, fight battles instead of avoiding them and wonder each step of the way if my decisions are right or not because there's no book to look in the back of for the answers and I wouldn't want one.

That makes life worth living. It's like living life for the first time, seeking out answers and wondering about the way of things as though someone else is not going to do it for you, because no one is. Most people don't take the time to wonder and even more fail to try to answer the questions that wondering leaves.

Taking the worlds answers for things is the lazy life; allowing the people before you and around you to navigate a lifetime removes all curiosity and knowledge from you. What can you have if you never look beyond what is given to you? Our minds are so very plastic, our manner so easily set into a comfortable mold where the roads are named and set in stone, but this is not the path to the future or to greatness or even to real life, but to repetition and a muddy death. These habits are the earmarks of failure on the grandest scale: doing so means handing off your life to an unnamed thing outside of you to rule and ruin at whim. There is no great and knowing person who knew to set our lives on a certain course and that we now follow because he was so right; there's the easy path that was made so easy by so many people doing it over and over again for no other reason then that it was laid out for them and therefore easy to follow. If a million people make the same mistake, it's still a mistake and not one others should follow because of it's normalcy.

It's so strange when you actually stop and look at the building blocks of your little world and realize that so many walls and rooms in your world were put up by people you never met. These weren't your decisions, you hardly even thought about it, but suddenly, your reality and life has been mapped out by a general consensus of unknowing, of fear, ease and inconsequence.

When did it become such a difficult task to think? People seem to actually fight against looking at life in any way other than the normal way, and this is in all fields: political, economical, biological, scientific, theological, personal. Why are we so afraid to see that we are wrong when knowing so could lead us in a direction where we could understand so much more and accomplish an unknowable amount?

I wonder how many discoveries and adventures have been sacrificed for comfort. I'm not talking about the comfort of an ikea couch, I'm talking about the comfort that you're a good person, that you're doing well and doing it right. I'm talking about the kind of comfort that means nothing to anyone but that everyone obsesses themselves with. The things that hold us back the most I believe is habitual, not wanting to break away from the common patterns of the every day for fear that you'll lose the floor beneath you and you'll be forced to create your own definitions for the world.

How much have you actually thought about? How much have you questioned? I'm not talking about conspiracy here; I'm talking about actually thinking about the reality you are subscribing to. It's your world now, why not look at it? Why not inspect it and confront it with it's flaws? What will you lose? For a moment, you might be lost, not knowing in which direction to turn, in which direction to believe, but that's the moment of real power and potential, because in that moment when you're not sure you know anything at all, you could know anything, you could understand a whole dimension of your reality you never cared to look at before.


The key, I think, to everything we don't yet know or understand is to be willing to look at it in all the ways that we are most afraid to look, most opposed to question and to give up on all the ways that make us comfortable. There's a universe of unknown and only a sliver we have mapped. How can we think that we are so great and knowing to really believe that our little sliver is true and correct?

That is why little worlds like that terrify me, because it's all part of an organism that pushes you to accept everything as law and as concrete and unchanging, and if you let it grab you in one asspect of your life, it can take down the whole game, and then you're left with nothing but what is given to you.

My world has to be my own. I'm not a genius, I'm not a world leader, but in my world and my reality, I cannot let another decide for me, and though I'm always ready to listen and learn, I cannot accept anything without inspecting and questioning and looking at it, because if I didn't, I could accept anything, and suddenly up is down and anything worth doing is beyond your reach up the path that was never yours that you have to slowly trudge to get anywhere...which in the end never was a where to begin with.

My world is full of questions now, and some make a pit in my stomach because I don't know what they mean, and even some of the theories send a shiver down my spine, but when I look at the alternative, I'm shaken to my core. In that life, I'm am nothing but a corpse waiting for someone to realize they need to get on with the ceremony and put me in the ground and I can't help my instinct to live. I wonder how so many people turn that part of themselves off.