I sat down to check my mail and all of a sudden got inspired. Here it is, 20 minutes later. Everything that is said is merely an opinion, so no need to get anyone’s knickers in a twist!
What if none of it matters?
What if we sit here, trying to make sense of everything that happens, the good, the bad, the indifferent, and what if, at the end of the day, at the end of our lives, none of it matters? What if we just go back to the dust, having strived and lived our whole lives trying, yearning to find meaning in things that maybe weren’t made to have meaning at all?
We search for complex answers, but perhaps the truth is that maybe there is no complexity, maybe the truth lies in realizing that things happen as a result of our actions, simple as that. What if the pieces really do just fall?
We waste our lives in school, in universities, we die with “accomplishments” to our names, but were we really happy? Did we really live? Or did we diminish the definition of “living” to spending hours in a cubicle and filling out paperwork, doing a job that we hate, but we do anyway to make ends meet? Why does our society demand us to compromise our happiness and free spiritedness in the name of providing for our families?
I refuse to apologize for thinking that perhaps life really should be like the movies. I am not suggesting that our lives be “perfect,” because things may not always go our way in life, but they don’t always go right in movies either. I think the reason why human kind is fascinated with movies is that they possess an unparalleled, somewhat unexplainable beauty, a way of portraying the exquisiteness of life that we do not possess on a daily basis. Movies provide an oasis of what we wish life was like. Why can’t it be like that? Why do we forget the momentary beauty and go back to mundane existences? When did humanity lose it’s extraordinary life? It’s appreciation for what truly matters in the scheme of things? My definition of “what truly matters” is doing what makes me happy, spending as much time as possible with the ones that mean the most to me, brightening someone’s day by smiling, by giving them a hug, by devoting a few hours to impart to a kid who might be living in a difficult circumstance. I see absolutely zero importance in spending my minutes, my hours, my days, my life, doing things that I have determined to be of little impact, a large waste of time, and a great way to throw my life away. To me, in my mind, however “unqualified” I may seem, being a 17 year old girl, life was made for living. It was created for our happiness. We have forced life to morph into routines, into cubicles with computer screens that occupy most of our time, into an existence that accepts far less than unadulterated happiness and remains dull and lacking in spontaneity.
Society might call me a dreamer. But what if we were all created to think like this? To be free? To hop outside in our business suits and dance in the rain if we want to, without worrying about a boss’s reprimand, to explore the countries of this world, to be roamers, to live free of mental restraints and societal confinements? We boil it all down to money. “Money makes the world go ’round.” We are driven to achieve, to be successful, to work hard, all for money. We spend hours in our offices, wherever they may be, forfeiting precious time with the people we love, forfeiting the minutes and hours when we could be leaving imprints on the hearts of our fellow mankind – all in the name of money. Somewhere along the way, we have exchanged the source of our satisfactions, and it has largely been transferred from the heart to money and consequential material possessions. Money keeps us running a race that will never satisfy us, that will never fulfill us, because our innate source of satisfaction does not stem from the rewards of money. We are truly satisfied by what are now called “the little things in life.” They actually aren’t all that little, they just seem that way because everyone is so preoccupied with work, money, and achievements. The faces I see on grown men who help someone, who mentor a child in a ghetto, who feed the homeless, who “let loose” a little and do something out of the ordinary, are expressions that money can never buy. Sure, money can buy temporary “happiness,” but there is a difference. The face of a man who just purchased a Ferrari is an expression of a sort of artificial happiness, a “happiness”‘ that is based off of something that man has created and has said “Hey, this car is worth $200,000. You want it. It will make you happy.” The positive feelings fade overtime; they fade when our neighbor buys a “better” car than ours; they fade when society tells us it isn’t good enough anymore. The face of a man who imparts values and integrity to a child living in difficult circumstances is an expression of the pure sort. It goes back to the foundation of who we are, the bare, untainted happiness and satisfaction that accompanies contributing something of value to someone else’s life. This true happiness and satisfaction stays with us forever, long after the Ferraris go “out of style” and long after material obsessions fade.
True happiness is intangible, it is not captured with diamonds and sports cars. Want to know how true happiness is captured? It’s found in appreciating the world around you, in finding beauty in all things, in stopping your life to think about someone else’s, in devoting your time to better the outcome of another’s life, it is found in penetrating the surface of people in order to reach their hearts. Happiness is going to sleep at night with a smile on your face, knowing that you changed someone; that you made someone else’s existence slightly more fantastic than it was when you found it. Happiness is getting back to what I think we were created to do – to be free, to truly, seriously, spontaneously, embrace life, embrace our seconds, our minutes, our hours, and our days of breathing on this earth. Easier said than done, I know. Society seems so tangible; so real to us; that we think it must be correct, it must know what is best. It does not. Sure, they’ll call us crazy. If we take a year off to go hop from country to country and live with strangers, if we run around in the middle of the street in the rain, if we decide to become artists and then turn around and decide to become marine biologists, they’ll call us crazy. You see, society has trained itself to become accustomed to routines, to “success” oriented people with money on the brain – it has put humanity in a box. Humanity is far larger than any box that mankind’s feeble brains can ever dream of putting it in.
We must define “success” for ourselves. So get used to standing out. No sense in trying to fit in to a world that may be lacking some of the pieces to the puzzle, a world thought to service the masses based on the opinions and views of a few. No thank you. Don’t expect the world to change with you. The people who we still talk about long after their deaths, the people who contributed to this world, were the people that most called crazy, the people that most deemed to be senseless. The world will still idolize money because money is something that can be controlled. Being able to control something ensures the ongoing reinforcement of societal ideals because the reins are in the hands of few. We simply have to decide if we want to idolize money, if we want it to define our existences and if we desire to use it as the meter stick of importance at the end of our lives. I see something else. I desire to go back to the pure happiness and spontaneity that I think humans were designed to have. I don’t want to measure my life by the number of zeros at the end of my bank statement, but by the people I impacted, the people I loved, by the lives I touched, the hearts I left an imprint on, the people that I helped, by the obstacles that I overcame, the moments I spent playing in the rain, and the days I spent roaming the world’s lands. I want that to be what gives my life meaning.
Duh, there’s no guarantee that everything will always go as planned. But maybe that is what gives us the freedom to be happy without restraint, knowing that regardless of the circumstances, we can still choose to contribute positively to a world that needs it and that we can live spontaneously.
“At the end when you’re looking back instead of forward you want to believe you made the most of what life gave you. You want to believe you’re leaving something good behind. You want it all to have mattered.” – Lucas Scott, One Tree Hill 
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