Carpe Diem

My dad was telling me the other day how life is a one big routine that we must all inevitably take. The only thing that breaks this monotony is the extra curricular activities that we do, which can vary from planting to shopping or to some sort of a sport or hobby. He said it in such a matter-of-factly manner, I almost believed it. The said routine would consist of waking up each morning to go to work, then going home to sleep and wake up the following day to go to work again…EVERY SINGLE DAY. If my math serves me right, that would be doing the same repetitive task 240 times in a span of one year. Just thinking about it makes me tired already. Imagine that out of the 365 days, you spend only a mere 34% doing spontaneous or “un-routinary” things. This can’t be true. I’m going to prove my dad wrong.

Coincidentally I just finished reading this book by Paulo Coelho, which discusses man’s pursuit for the meaning of life in an angst-ridden orthodox society. The protagonist, finding herself stuck in a soulless routine with everything in her life being insanely the same all the time, decides to end her life. It’s such a good read. The book expresses my exact sentiments, which I precisely bought in hopes of satisfying my own frustrations about life.

The author zeroed in on bitterness as the main culprit, which he says occurs when people become afraid of the so-called reality that they begin building their own world with high defensive walls against the outside world. After which, they slowly start losing all desire and spend their energy on constructing more walls to make reality they want it to be. Thus everything becomes automatic and repetitive up to a point that each action is unaccompanied by any emotion; no desire whatsoever, even the will to live or die, which then leads to an even bigger problem.

So the solution? It’s really just a matter of having a good outlook on life. I think the reason why we succumb into a routinary way of life is because we want to conform and be the same like everybody else. After all, that is what society dictates; Work now, play later. The so-called reality will insist that if we don’t consume the other 66% working our asses off, we’ll have to pay a huge price for it. Thus work becomes our world, our false reality. We become so focused with the work part that we forget to see the real outside world, which should have F-U-N written all over it. In an attempt to conform, we become mechanical slaves to our work that we eventually fall into an endless pit of boring monotonous tasks. We need to have our own ‘awareness of life’ all fixed up, because right now our awareness of life seems to unsuitably consist of working and earning hard instead of partying and living it hard. We should dare to be different; we should be proud celebrators of life. This gift only comes once after all.