Little Has Changed

I wrote this almost six years ago and I just found it. 

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In my recent musings about life I’ve discovered how silly life is. As a wee little’n I didn’t like to be told what to do because I’m stubborn and pompous and was certain I knew me better than anyone else. I like learning as I go, working with my hands, touching the hot stove to figure out that I don’t want to do that again. I say that, but now, as a nervous adult, I tend to avoid all metaphorical stoves because I don’t want to get hurt or find out that I enjoy masochistic abuses to make up for things I think I should have done better.

I’ve been thinking about the strivers and achievers in life and I chuckle a little at them. It’s a respectful chuckle. I’m glad there are people willing to solve problems that I can't even finish reading about. I’m happy for people interested in the sticky inner-workings of the human body, the mathematically precise calculations that keep a building standing upright, the people that experiment with tasty foods, and I really love the person who invented the heater. I’m so glad these people exist. Without them, natural selection would have gotten rid of me ages ago. But now that everything is up and running over here in the US it seems silly to me to keep editing and rebuilding things that don’t need to be messed with. There are other places that don’t even have heaters yet.

And I’m not chuckling at the everyday achiever. I’m chuckling at the greedy and socially unconscious strivers-for-more. When I was sixteen, I followed Dad on a business trip to Hawaii and we went down into a valley between two mountains (that’s how valleys work) and there were just a handful of people living in that valley and they grew rice and taro and had mango trees, horses, and a beach just a few steps outside of their tropical jungle. It was the first time it really occurred to me that I could choose a life very different from the one my teachers were preparing me for back home. (Thus started the ten year angsty phase.) The trips I had followed Dad on in the past all seemed like a fantasy life and the idea of living anywhere they didn’t speak English seemed very much like a bad idea when I was a little girl. But The Hawaiian Valley made sense; the growing your food and enjoying your day bit. I liked that a whole lot. Suddenly I felt like I had to leave the contiguous US to live the kind of life I wanted. 

Now hold on to your eye rolls and chuckles. I wasn’t looking for a life void of work but rather a life full of time. Taking care of myself on my own watch. Tending to things that need tending to without having to run my thoughts past other people. Because other people are idiots. And other people don’t really have the answers either. The adults you look to for answers are adults for the first time, so they’re just doing what they think is best or what saw their parents do. That all makes sense I guess, but realized I could decide to be my own version of myself and not the paper-pushing version I was being shaped into by The Man.

Now that I’ve been a practicing adult for a few years, I see that it is scary to leave the security that The Man provides in exchange for heaps of your time, and life is terribly lonely without other idiotic people in your Hawaiian Valley.  I was thinking about how I’ve set up my little life here, working for The Man in a roundabout way so that I feel like I’m beating the system. But then I start to think about all the lives that don’t have heaters and I'm reminded that I'm living in a pretty great little bubble. Then I thought, “If my bubble caught on fire, what would I grab on my way out?” and other than Pippa and a box of letters, I couldn’t come with anything. In some ways, I’d be relived for all of my crap to burn away into ash. I don’t need that crap. I just need a place to stay warm and enough money for food. That’s all anybody in any pocket of the world needs.

What would I do with heaps of money? How would I feel as a famous person with no privacy and so many judgmental eyes watching how I lived my life? What happens when you crash your expensive car or buy a house that’s too big to clean in one day? I’ll tell you. You lose time. You lose it to working for more money for a new car or you lose it to maintaining the things that you’ve bought with all of your money. You spend your weekend cleaning the boat and manicuring your giant lawn. I don’t want to sound like I’m poo-pooing these things. I’m a spoiled person with an addiction to once-in–a-lifetime vacations and expensive ice-creams. It’s just that I’ve been watching so many people make such greedy and selfish decisions that it makes me feel foolish to be part of such an existence. 

I guess these people do things these with a motive to be remembered as successful, but think about how little thought you actually give to the handful of people from history that we do remember for great things. What about the billions of other lives? Billions of unremarkable lives came before you. I’m going to die one day, an unknown speck on the timeline of existence.

That really takes the pressure off. 

I say be judicious with the time you have and do something nice for someone.