If It Feels Good Do It

OTHER

I talked to a good friend of mine over the weekend. He’s married to this dream girl, who he loves a lot. A few years ago, he finished his P.h.d. and now he has a great job and makes a lot of money. His wife makes a lot of money, too.

But when I asked him how he was doing he said he felt kind of bored and lonely. He said he’s always thinking “what’s the next stage in my life going to be?”

When his mother-in-law heard about his state of mind she told his wife that clearly it was time to have kids.

SELF

I’m not trying to disrespect my friend, or his life. It’s his life.

For me though, there must be more to life than having kids because of boredom. I don’t think it makes me a bad person for thinking that. It doesn’t make me a good person, either. It just makes me a person.

It’s not that I have a problem with being married, or having kids. It’s just that I have a problem with doing something that I clearly feel is not right, even if other people say that it is.

PEOPLE

We have a tendency to spend most of our time preparing for the future. We spend about a quarter of our lives going to school. It’s not always fun. We go because our parents tell us to. Or we go because we think that someday, we’ll be able to get a good job and make lots of money.

Then we get a good job and do make lots of money. But working for someone that pays well is usually kind of a pain. They pay you well for a reason.

So we focus on retirement. Someday, we imagine retiring with a lot of money and being able to do whatever we want. Our life might be boring now, but someday it will be fun. We constantly think about “what’s next?”

The main question we have is “when is life getting better going to happen?” We hope that our lives will suddenly improve due to future, external forces.

DEATH

But someone who truly realizes who they are is prepared to die at any moment.

For someone who knows who they are, there is no retirement. Or, someone who knows who they are is always partially retired. Life starts and ends, now.

Every breath they take, they know could be their last. If something should be said, they say it. If something should be written, they write it. They travel far to meet friends and talk to their mother because they know it might be their last chance.

They search their hearts to find what to do in any given moment, and they do it even though they might fail.

In their dying breath, they do not worry about things like retirement, and for someone who truly realizes who they are, every breath is a dying breath.

FAMILY

As I said, I don’t have something against family life. When I imagine being married and having kids, I imagine being happy. But if I chose that life for myself right now, it would feel forced. It would not feel right at all. I see a lot of people making that decision for themselves, even though it doesn’t feel right for them.

The same is true for a million other things I see people around me doing. So many people do things because someone else told them to. They don’t even stop to think if what they are doing truly makes sense. I also see people doing things because they think there will be some benefit in the extremely distant future. For those people it’s never clear to me though, when their present will stop and their future will begin.

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