The Race with No End

I sat in the quietness of the house contemplating the rat-maze-of-a-life I'm trapped in. As the sunlight broke through the morning air, it hit me: we will never win. We live a life where objects become outdated so frequently, and no matter what we do to get ahead and increase our comforts, we are always going to be fighting the decay of our world around us. We think we'll one day beat back death, deconstruction, and entropy, but they are natural occurrences that are vital to the function of the earth. They can never be defeated.

The more we fight to get a little more, the more we separate from one another. It is like we are running a race but yet we don't realize there is no prize at the end, only a long run of futile anguish. If we would make communal societies then the industrial machine that runs us ragged would disappear and interdependence would fill the void in our lives. The world can only become peaceful when we join together to rejoice in a common happiness. Our current competitiveness not only takes us further from harmony, but infects the world with unnecessary murder, pain, and heartache.

We connive and scorn as we fight for that oasis of a perfect life. It will never come and we will never "win" anything. Whether it be retirement, huge salaries, or extravagant properties, there will never be a time that you can quit running the race and declare victory. There will always be another leg added.

Take an extreme example like winning the lottery and imagine what would truly happen. The massive millions can not be immune to inflation and the money, in time, will disappear. So, in essence, these races we fight for every day only offer a mock sense of relief when in actuality they increase our burdens exponentially. Inflation is more than an economic bacteria, it is a tangible representation of our pain and anger toward one another. We want to have more and punish others, and that greed is metamorphosed into inflation.

Happiness is like taking a gorgeous picture you have spent years painting and, after realizing it is a masterpiece, tearing it to shreds. Like the materialism we devour, what other purpose would the picture have other than as a weapon to taunt others?

We know we should abandon our suburban lives and head to the hills to live freely, but we feel it is a joke and, when we get to the countryside with a flower placed nicely behind our ear, we would look back and see the industrial world laugh as it devours all of our "stuff" we left behind. That fright keeps us running on our gerbil wheels.

I haven't ripped the life-support wires out yet either, but, god, how I want to. Maybe it is like jumping off a building: you just have to either do it or not. I have me toes on the ledge and I'm looking down. I am waiting for someone to push me, but it has got to be all me. Just me.

Living Life Backwards

I sometimes get scared when I think about being without a job. The losing of our house, cars, and toys can be frightening, but work carries us down a road away from true happiness. Our society is setup to make us move farther from our real spirits more and more each day. We are constantly being wooed toward false realities, especially through our televisions, that we forget who we really are.

We can receive all the materialistic idols we long for, and after we emerge from all the discarded shrink wrap and styrofoam, we will discover that it really isn't that special. We have these great buildups of expectations only to be left in a state of sad realization that harmony and love live only in the simplest things in life, not in the factory-produced piles of trash we numbly accumulate.

To live life is to lose all we have and see life as it has always been and always will be: simple yet pure. We are living life backwards as we teach people to strive for all the "stuff" they want in their lives. We need to show our children that the man or woman that lives under a tree in the park experiences life more than the CEO who is constantly worried about how well their stocks are doing. A materialistic life is an endless well that we can never fill with happiness no matter how hard we try.

We wake up to our carpeted world and stroll the concrete to our cars, then we spend eight hours in a tile-floored building before taking our cars back to our carpeted houses. When is the last time we have actually touched the earth? When is the last time we have felt a blade of grass tickle our backs? Just imagine the percentage of time we spend away from Mother Nature and we can begin to understand why we are so angry and lost. A simple middle-of-the-night excursion to our backyards as we look to the glowing moon in the crisp early morning air can bring us more stabilization to our life than pills, therapy, or toys ever will.