That Great Burden

Often times we fail to notice the years passing us by, our accumulated memories and experiences serve as reminders of the time that passed us by until we realize that little by little we accept responsibility. Ah yes, responsibility, that burden that we see as too heavy for us but then at some point we no longer have the luxury of escaping it, whether it be something that we take on willingly, by choice or because circumstances have left us no logical alternative.

More often than not, we bring these things upon ourselves, the choices we make, the paths we have chosen lead us to this. I do not believe in the "right-ness" or "wrong-ness"of choices only that they are what they are and should be accepted as gracefully as possible. In the life of a person, we make inumerable decisions: to eat or not to eat, to play or not to play, to love or not to love, to let go or not to let or, what is for me, the most important, to be happy or not not to be happy. If our existence mirrored that of the lives of characters in a video game wherein we have the ability to SAVE and then LOAD, then maybe life would be better but I doubt that. I think life would be such a pointless exercise if we were to have comfortable and care-free lives, never taking responsibility for our actions, always changing the outcome based on what we want, we would be as gods of our own destiny, able to forsee and alter the future events. Would a life like that be worth living?

If I was asked, I would say: nay, 'tis not a life I would wish to lead. What happens to the pain? the anguish? the desperation and frustration and loniliness and saddness? How can one truly feel alive and say that one has lived if these have never come to pass in our miserable existence? Again, the rule of opposites apply; to enjoy happiness we must experience the bottom pit of depression and sadness, what is hope without despair and what is love without hate? These emotions all make us human, if we choose only the emotions we want then we are just machines with swtiches, similar to Data, a character in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation with his pathetic emotion switch.

Pardon my cliche-ness but as Pablo Neruda wrote: "Love is so short, forgetting is so long." but then such is life. We choose to let go of the one we care about the most and we hate ourselves for that decision, we can hate ourselves our entire lives but it won't change a thing, those arms will no longer hold us, those lips will no caress our lips, those eyes will no longer look at us with the same love or passion.

To quote Neruda once again: "Another's. She will be another's, like my kisses before her...". What we can do is go on with our lives carrying only the fondest thoughts and the happiest memories of times past and be thankful for that moment of bliss. Some are fortunate to have the priviledge to choose to send away the person they care about or love while others have no say in the matter. Who is more fortunate?

I believe that wallowing in self pity is but a necessary stage during times of despair, similar to the "drinking and dialing" and the "I- hate- you- you- ruined- my- life- stage" stage but these are just stages, moments of weakness not lifestyles to be maintained. I believe the truest measure of a man is his ability of stand up after he's been beaten down and kicked and spit on then throwing the aggressor the finger and saying: "that's all you got?!"

We choose how we live our lives and supposedly, our friends are there to support us, only to support us, not to carry us upon their shoulders because it is a choice, whether we want to stand up once again in the first place or not.

Belated Merry Christmas.