"Life's too short to phone it in."
Idee fixee. This can be nothing else. Obsession? No. There's a manic tint to that word I don't like. Achieving life is my idee fixee. Specifically, it's in the physical activity that I find myself inspired to write about achieving life. Stillness is not laziness, finding your edge, leaning beyond your edge, these are just three of the lessons that I learned from yoga. Determination, purposefulness, integrity another three from triathlon training. But where is it that I find joy? It's in the learning, growing, leaving that I find joy.
There's a reason that "On To The Next One" is my latest most loved song by Jay-Z. "And niggas don't be mad because it's all about progression/ loiterers should be arrested" And to use a jarringly different source of inspiration, one of my favorite verses in the Bible speaks of moving from glory to glory. Two more disparate muses I could not find, but despite their opposition to one another there's agreement: life can't stay still. Life must move inexorably onward. A person must have goals and must march bravely forward in their achievement. As Ayn Rand said, a circle is the shape most proper for nature. It is not proper for humanity. Humans must live like rays of light, starting at one point and firing off into the distance, focused, directed... directioned.
What I've been writing against is the kind of life that does not move forward. It moves, but the motion is that of a rocking horse. Plenty of action without direction, this is what saddens and angers me. This is what I left behind. I don't hate popular culture, television or things that people do for pleasure. My ire burns towards the use of those things as a distraction from the fact of life, against aimless and mindless consumption, against a life not lived, or a life lived by instinct and impulse.
Call it immaturity, my Christian predilection for crusades, a Messiah complex or a neo-liberal affinity for values imperialism, but I can't stand by and watch others phone it in. I remember living a phoned in life. "It's too hard. I don't want to." It sickens me to consider how often these words left my mouth or festered in my mind. It brings me to my knees to think how very often I'd pine helplessly to watch lives being lived while I wondered at my daily torment. Reader, do you know what I'm talking about?
Are you phoning in your life, not pursuing worthwhile pursuits, out of lack of confidence and courage? Are you going through the motions in your life? Certainly there's movement. You wake up, you go to work, check e-mail, check facebook, wait for someone to talk to you on G-chat, come home, watch T.V., or sometimes you go out, go to sleep, wake up tomorrow ready for another empty day. That's 24 hours of movement. Where is the progress? You might relocate from one neighborhood to a nicer one or from a lower paygrade to a higher one. Is that progress? Is that all you have in your life? Is your heart alive?
Well now, that's not something I can answer for you is it? At any rate, go and watch Lost. It should be coming on right now.
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