It's an amazing time of life... An entire new life waits in front of me, asking to be explored, enjoyed, lived, cherished...
It's not a special time though. It could have been any other day of life. It is just another day of my life. What is making it different is the cognizance of the fact, that I understand I am free to live my life at my terms, do what I deem suitable. Fulfill my destiny, if I might use that controversial word...
I wonder why can't I always stay in that mood. With that positive optimism that everyday is a new day, and brings with it every possibility that I can imagine. Perhaps, it takes some of those decisive moments in life, like when you change cities, without knowing where you are headed next. Or quit your job, and don't know what's next. However, perhaps just perhaps, it's more important to ask that question more often. For possibilities, better ones, exciting ones, life changing ones are always around us waiting to be sometimes gently tapped sometimes vehemently shaken.
My life is changing. Change of country, climate, friends, daily habits, food, culture the normal stuff world feeds on to you, is upon me in few days. For the first few days the change will sometimes shock me, sometimes leave me in awe. And by the time I will get used to it, and to the new life, I will forget the question that, was this life in the first place? Do the people, buildings, culture, food, clothes, languages around me define my life? Or rather I should ask, should they define my life?
The answer can be pondered about at length, but the fact is that our environment defines our actions. And those actions are an outcome of our believes and perceptions. Different people respond differently to the same environment. And different people form different perceptions and believes looking at the same environment. That's the beauty of it... It's also the ugly truth sometimes.
Something very obvious and natural to you, could be completely outrageous and unacceptable to someone from the same environment. People learn to have moderate views over time, so there is less dissonance amongst members of society. That's what the society does to you. It makes you lose that power of sensitivity to your environment and forces you to accept the mass hysteria, sometimes for good. Mostly for some reason, the society doesn't want you to talk about, why else would it banish out the extreme views?
Apparently society is able to work well that way, Humans as a race can be called quite successful judging by population growth! As a species and civilization change has been overwhelming for humans to adapt to. The problem with change is, you can try very hard and cope up with it, it's quite possible, but it is relentless and untiring. And it wears you out sooner or later. On the other hand, it brings immense joy too, for if you can sit back and look at it impartially it can astonish and surprise you in ways unconceivable. Change is an object of beauty, it is a great challenge, for some it is the object of life, for others it comes as an unavoidable part of life
It is a generally accepted notion that successful people/species are those that have learnt to cope up with change. But what does it take to have that capability?
Is it patience, to wait for a life changing change to show up, and then take the right decisions, actions, and make the change somehow fit with your life. Or make your life fit to the change? Or is patience the wrong word and should be replaced with laziness or shortsightedness? Well most of us do this one quite regularly. We all know how to get around with problems as they arise, or when we can't handle them we fall back to the many fallback mechanisms, and if they fail too, we just wither. But some other changes don't really arise as problems. They barely ever get noticed. Which probably means they are not important enough, to stop and ponder over.
Or may be it's one way we keep the change in check, by avoiding, ignoring, postponing it. But well, what else is life after all? Ignoring the fact that it ends with death, or postponing that thought to the very last moment. Focus on the problems at hand, and ignore the rest or leave them for later. Sounds like a great solution. Also sounds like just survival...
So life is then just basically survival, it's a simple game, where you play against death and try to dodge/avoid it, till you can, and then you anyway lose, but not before enjoying the game for as long as you can. Society helps. It helps by introducing you to a lot of ways to survive. It has institutions, where you can gain skills and hence money and hence buy food. Or it has religion, where you can find peace in times of lost hope. It also has families and friends, where you can fall back when you have nothing else to live for.
Surely all that enormous setup of religion and moral values and corporates and politics and stuff works out. More people choose life and find means to sustain it daily than the ones who don't. But what does society gain out of this immense plotting? Does society even know what it is trying to do actually? And does it ever actively contemplate if it's choosing the right way to do it? Does it know how to encompass changes and deal with them? And does it also only just survives, somehow?
Anyway, who is society? Isn't it basically just us. And we don't normally look at changes as they occur, we look at them, as they start affecting us and hence must our society as it is also just us. Then we/society ignores them till the point where they start hurting us. Then we change our lives to adapt to them and thrive in the ensuing peace and bask in the glory of our short lived conquests, till we find ourselves in a bigger mess.
Perhaps there is more about life and change and society than normally meets eye. And perhaps we as a species are too dumbed down to even notice that every second our life is changing. From the 108,000 kilometers that our spaceship Earth is travelling per hour on it's annual journey around the Sun, to the melting glaciers in the Himalayas which would probably not recover till the next ice age, we just safely keep avoiding those insignificant changes and go about surviving each day as it comes... The plan is working out brilliantly, we are thriving on avoidance...
