Your Life: A Choice

It’s difficult putting yourself out there. Your heart is probably the most difficult thing you’ll ever wear.

No one said it would be easy, being human, exposing your vulnerabilities, your every weakness to the world. In fact, it’s easier to be a critic. Stay detached, make fun of everybody else for the choices they’ve made. Mock everybody. Be a nihilist.

But I don’t like people who don’t believe in anything. I don’t trust someone who makes their life around mocking others, claiming chaos is the natural state of the world, that life has no meaning, owing allegiance to no one and nothing... That’s too easy. Being asleep at the wheel is probably the easiest thing you can do in this life. Take the easy road, take a pay check, hide from the world.

Scientists have confirmed that 83.94% of the population is legally brain dead.

They are pushed by the winds of fate from one place to another, chasing after things and toys and experiences that grant pleasure. They chase pleasure like a dog chasing a bounding tennis ball. They chase pleasure because they equate it with happiness, and when the pleasure goes, they turn to their televisions, and their fast food, and their government issued checks. They go back to sleep.

This is not happening far away—it’s all around you.

So we are faced with a choice: either you live with your heart on your sleeve, pushing toward something that fulfills deeply, even if it also means experiencing less than pleasurable conditions; or we remain asleep at the wheel, pushing papers from one side of a desk to the other, sending endless emails, updating statuses that no one cares about… no one, that is, except the other drones who are in the same condition. Hiding. Until that one day comes—if we’re lucky—when we stop and realize how empty our lives really are. We turn around and see all the things we missed out on, because we took the easy route. We criticized. We hid. We didn't dare look at our vulnerabilities, and see them for what they truly were--our strangest and most potent powers. Our unique characteristics. Our true joys.

But by then, it will be far too late to do anything about it. We’ll continue to hide, doing it for the money, because that's what we've always done. And then we will die inside, and regret being such morons, with a thousand unfulfilled dreams.