Pay Attention... You are gonna learn something!

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Race back to the future!

nce upon a time, a wise man lived through the history. He said: “All I know is one thing: I know nothing”. This was a cool guy named Socrates from Ancient Greece. Exposing the truth, he corrupted the youth of Athens and spoiled quite a lot of Greece. Eventually he was convicted and sentenced to death. The rest is history.

What are we? Some billions years ago, we were all fish swimming around in the water, and then maybe there was this retarded and mutant baby fish that crawled out of the ocean with its mutant fish-hands, and then something like that! Go ahead; you can make up your own version of this evolution theory. Thanks to Darwin!

Aren’t we the most intelligent creature? Yes, maybe! Or maybe not! Maybe there are other intelligent lives on other planets in the universe because they (we call them aliens, ET...) obviously have chosen not to contact us. Why bother? Maybe we are not so smart. We are just a little bit smarter than apes, dolphins and dogs, and we are just a bunch of egotists. Excuse me for shattering the entire mankind’s ego. Someone had to do it!

Ask me if I believe in heaven, and I will say No! If you ask me if I have no faith in God, then you’ve got it wrong. It’s God who has no faith in us. I am not an atheist. I think God is vengeful. He is pissed off about something “WE” did thousands of years ago, the very reason for the existence of human race on earth, biblically! (Hint: Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit.) And so the God just can’t get over with it. He takes what’s closest to us. Then why does God give us anything to start with, you may ask! Well, look at it this way. If you want to make a baby cry, first you give it a lollipop, and then you take it away. If you never give it a lollipop to begin with, then you would have nothing to cry about. That’s like God, who gives us life, love, and health, just so he can tear it all away and make us cry.

Analogically, we are still that retarded fish today. Okay, we don’t have gills, and that’s why we are mutant, but we still think the way fishes might do. Suppose an eagle catches a fish from the water with its claws, the fish still wringing. Then the eagle accidently drops its catch back in the water. I like to imagine that the fish trying to tell its friends about this near-death experience. For a short time the fish was outside the world, and could see forever, that there is so much more than it ever knew. Yet the fish is glad to be back where it was, just the way we betray ourselves and then get back to the make-work and busywork of living.

When we care too much about something, it blinds us. We suffer for our ego and obsession. We suffer for our obsessive infatuation to control the uncontrollable. We focus on what we cannot control where we drain up all our energy, time, and freedom to eventually become or get more of exactly what we don’t wish in the first place. Of the many phenomena, time is the greatest cause of our suffering because it is one of those things that we cannot control, but nevertheless which we always try to in vain just to suffer. We just cannot grab our magic-wand and hover over it to create more of. It’s not a fairy tale. Life is no Mario game. There is no second chance, no “restart” button to life. Time-machine is merely a fiction.

The so-called civilization we talk about and the life we lead… we aren’t made for all this. Deep down inside we are still an animal. We are a monster, without tail and horns; thanks to evolution, again! Just think about it… Do we really feel comfortable maintaining this rigid pose of normality and conformity? Don’t we just love feeling out of control… that inebriation of free-fall? That’s why we go bungee and skydiving and other… you name it. That’s why people smoke marijuana. It feels quite a relief to get away from the everyday formality and to own up to the outlaws and be the monsters we really are. But today what we are doing is nothing more than merely surviving and at the same time think that we are gonna live forever. How many of us have lived with the reality of our own mortality? In fact, we are a helpless creature at the mercy of some unknown energy, whatever that be! We are not living; we are merely surviving. The world just didn’t fall apart for one more day. Be grateful for it.

So what do you see here? A glass half full or half empty? I know this article reads with negative connotation, but optimism may often times turn out to be status-quo. You’ve heard this glass “half full; half empty” riddle a lot. You know the prescribed answer. But have you really learned anything significant from it? Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether the glass is half full or half empty. All it matters is: Is it gonna quench your thirst?

So what did you learn? That’s right. We learn nothing.

Trust me. I lied.

©Linkinmyth 2017: Pay Attention… You’re gonna learn something.