I've been doing a great deal of thinking the last couple of weeks about life. I guess the eight year anniversary of my mom's passing prompted it. Well, that and my now evolving fear of people dying around me.
Before she passed, I never felt that way. Never thought twice about it really. Even after losing my grandmother and my great grandmother. With those two, I can say that I can understand the timing of their death.
My mom was 41. Heart-attack. Boom. Gone.
It's scary to think she had lived half her life by the time she was 20. I would be curious to know, had that knowledge had been available to her, what different choices she would have made.
I travel through the internet reading different things from different people about their lives and their view of life itself.
You have the angst teens who think that death is cool and around the corner. It's the 'in' thing to think, plus the understanding of what life is, really at that moment is lost to them. You don't start understanding it until later or until you've had a defining moment which changes the way you view life.
You have people that have done incredible amount of things with their lives. Makes your life seem simple and small. Funny thing is, most of them comment about people that they think make their life seem simple and small.
Then you have the ones I don't understand. People that place themselves in a life situation, don't do a thing about it, and then complain about how much longer of a life they have to live.
Before my mom passed, I started learning that I had a bit of control of my life. Sure some decisions are harder than others to make. Some decisions to make your life and living situation better take some balls, some courage, and a lot of work to accomplish.
I was at a dead end job working behind a drill rig. Getting to work before the sun got up and working past the sun went down. The apartment I was living in had a great deal of memories that kept me sad and depressed.
Then one day...I was talking to a guy who was near his 50's. He'd been drilling for 30 something years. It was literally all that he knew. He was for the most part a miserable person that wished all the time that he could do something different.
"When I started this job, it was supposed to be temporary," he says to me one day during breakfast. "Next thing I know, 10 years passed by, then 20, now 30, I guess it's all I'm meant to do"
I'd been having that same conversation with myself. Except, for me it was only 2 1/2 years. I watched him work that day with the wheels turning in my head. It was the most profound thing he had ever said in the time I knew him and trust me, he didn't have that much profoundness in him.
When this conversation took place, I had one week before I needed to resign the lease to my apartment. That day, while I was watching him work, a simple thought entered my mind.
"I don't want to be him. What can I do?"
I pondered it for a week and I made a decision the day I signed my lease. I signed a six month lease and turned in a six month notice to my work. The day my lease was up, I was going to move.
Not just to a new apartment, but to a new town/city. I was going to get a different job. If I had to, I would get two jobs. I was going to enjoy my life and not look back at it and say "I guess it's all I was meant to do".
Since then, I took a dream of mine to live by the ocean and have done that. When a job opportunity came to have a different life experience across the country... I did that.
It's not easy leaving the self built prison you build for yourself. It's comfortable, it's predictable, it's just simply known. But it is what it is, a self built prison.
I believe that if you are past your teen years, you are old enough to make decisions in your life that make it happy or make it miserable. You could blame the past, but the past is not the present and it surely is not the future. People make small choices everyday that will affect their future.
For instance, the simple fact that you chose to come to my site and read this post in it's entirety was one of a million choices you could have made. You could have eaten something, you could have visited someone else, you could gone to the store, you could have gone to an amusement park, you could be packing your old life and making a new one...etc..
Thing is... life is what you make of it with the everyday choices that shape it. If you make the same choices repeatedly, please don't come to me bitching about how boring and mundane it is. You chose it to be that way, therefore, you must want it that way, and if you want it that way, I don't understand why you are bitching about it.
I'm trying to chose not to be scared that people closest to me could move on. That's a thing that I need to work on.
But I can say this, and I think my wife agrees with me, if at some point we find our lives to be unsatisfying, we're going to make a choice to change it, because we both know that the work we put into doing that, the better our lives will be...
...and there will be no regrets when looking back and no wishing for death to knock on our door.
Interesting. Having kids add another dimesnion to self-built prisons. For many years I was obsessed with finding a way to break free from my desk-chains, but the need to feed and clothe the kiddies trumped all thoughts of flight. Once the kids hit their teen years I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, at the same time all sorts of new opportunities were presented and now all has changed.
I think self build prison where kids are concerned is a different subject. You have to be able to take care of your own.
With that said, people also use their kids as an excuse not to change when change is possible.
I think those people listen to Dr. Laura and don't have much of a mind of their own.
The only constant thing in life is that it changes constantly. Your arrogance and self-rightousness are whats imprisoning you. Dont come bitching to me when you realize that some changes and some choices are simply out of your control.
Ha Cugrr.