You know I have lived my life (I’m not dying or anything) from one incentive to another. I worked for the incentive of money, I travelled for the incentive of exposure - I studied with the incentive to compensate for my lack of focus unlike my friends who are extremely intelligent and I guess more articulate than I am - they seem to have gotten certain things I wish I got right and as happy as that makes me, it made me realise that the only way I could match that level of excellence was if I did or became something of my own.
When you live for incentives, suddenly, gradually rather - life becomes a series of monotonous tasks and the beauty of those tasks almost always disintegrates and transforms into a shit-hole of a ‘to-do’ list. These beautiful experiences and teachings of those tasks ahead have now become something that you ‘have’ to do. Somehow that always makes me question the whole idea of ‘incentives.’ I am in a clinical field of reason and logic and most of the time, I don’t agree with it. I don’t agree with Pavlov’s conditioning or Freud’s psychoanalysis - I lean towards Kahlil Gibran’s freshly scented words and the mesmerising actions of Frost or Kabir, not to say that they are less scientific than the psychologists, they speak life and not simply conceptual theories.
Nothing that I have planned in travel or in life has worked out the way I had planned, not one bit. It’s always a roller-coaster of liquid anxiety - one day I sit on the edge of my bed and decide that,
“Hey!”
“That’s it”
“No more roaming around like an aimless chimp.”
“You will get a job and get that cheque at the end of the month and study psychology like you’re going to die tomorrow.”
Another thought suddenly creeps up, “If I die tomorrow, do I want to sit and study the biological patterns of mood disorders?”
“I remember that treasured little elephant from the Netflix show ‘Elephant Whispers’, let's see how to reach that place, maybe take an interview and speak to the owners as well.”
This is how I wrestle with myself every night, not knowing what I want - where I’m going or why I’m doing, what I’m doing. I can’t come to terms with the fact regarding what Alan Watts said about life “The purpose of life is life itself.” That’s absurd, if that is so, why am I racking my brains like a hyperactive monkey? Why am I constantly and impulsively finding meaning in my daily actions? Why am I so damn desperate to find a colossal amount of purpose in my occupation? And when I don’t find meaning in my daily actions why do I turn to stupid chemical intoxicants that make life worse rather than better?
Sometimes it's confusing, with all this technological advancement and industrial progress I wonder - was this necessary? Come on, we simply wanted some meaning and to do so we ended up building corporations, companies, and a damned civilisation - Elon decided to build a colony on Mars, what’s happening? This is going out of hand I think?
Are you scared of simply pausing for a minute from incessantly doing an activity and just being still - just stay and suddenly you can feel the void? The innermost core of every activity is devoid of any meaning and yet it is repeated a million times in search of it, how can you find the seed of a mango in a strawberry? Not to say that there is such a thing as a mango. That’s it I guess, we are all just dredging and hovering through strawberries without relishing them because we think that one day we might just find a mango seed within one of them and that it would make it worth it.
I hate to admit it but the times I remember are those which I didn’t plan. And I get it, we are control-centric beings - we are used to exerting power and conscious will over every object or event we come in touch with; but I think we are inessential.
Things don’t happen because of us; they happen despite us. The difference is gigantic.
I have travelled to countless places and wandered in the strangest of streets, in those peculiar moments of silence and confusion - something reminded me that life functions in such a bizarre fashion as if it expresses itself through me, I am a conscious medium through which the void and silence of pain, pleasure, mystery, happiness etc are expressed - an empty canvas that has abstract, directionless paint splattered all over; it has strokes of pain dripping by the fringes, slashed with a thin swipe of happiness, maybe a blob of romance and just a few trinkets of rationality.
What is the point of this? Nothing really, as Watts mentioned, “The purpose of life is life itself.” Strange man. However, all I can say is that there are times when life seems disrupted, it seems as if, it's too much for you and making sense of such a grand phenomenon is an uphill battle. Just remember that no one told you to make sense of something that has its roots based on nonsense.
If there was any point or purpose in life then there wouldn’t be a plethora of other things to choose from! We would all be in that line, there would be no suffering and we would eventually live as flesh-robed robots.
Let life flow through you instead of you directing it to move in a certain way (The latter is stupidity) and this may be against the whole “work hard to be how you want to be” philosophy - it’s fine being stuck in a tornado and just assimilating its nature even though the rest of the idiots are busy gathering their tools to build a house in the neighbouring village - who knows, you might just befriend it.
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