How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.
Ryan Bingham
 |
| Lonely by Sudipto Sarkar on Visioplanet photography |
Sometimes I feel like disappearing. Going somewhere, leaving everything and everyone behind and starting a new "life". A life where I don't settle down, where I keep travelling from city to city, country to country. Work small part-time short-term jobs to make enough money for a motel room and dinner, and to hitchhike my way through the roads. Maybe call mom and dad sometimes, just to tell them that I'm still alive. And then, maybe go to an icy place, or a desert, or an uninhabited island and make a house out of wooden twigs and leaves, hunt for dinner maybe. And then stay there for a few months and figure out what to do next.
All that, or I could just stay where I am, with my backpack filled with stuff I don't need but love enough not to be able to empty them, with people who aren't really all that close... and then with those people who have betrayed my trust, time and again, but society has its "dos and don'ts". I could just as well stay right here, working nine hours everyday, living what I'm told, is a "normal" life, although I don't see how not doing what you'd want to do with your life by minding your moral and social obligations towards society could be "normal". Well, maybe I just speak a different language. In other words, I'm not in terms with the ways of what they call society.
But, let's not go there. I'd rather write songs to express all the society and their idea of (false) freedom.
In the end, it all boils down to what you want. I don't want my backpack to be empty. Never did. In fact, I wanted there to be a "back home". When you are growing up, you have this idea in your head, and make no mistake, the ideas always, invariably come with deadlines. For example, you'd think that by the time you're 23, you'd have someone you'd want to spend the rest of your life with, that by the time you're 29, you'd get married and settle down, maybe have a kid.
What you actually get is a lonely life, your friends settling down, and you, afraid of getting in relationships because of your last break up almost destroying your whole idea of a traditional "life", thereby sparking off another version of you, which you let define who you are in about half a decade of its existence. And you become an alcoholic. You drink to cope with pain... to forget the fact that you're a dead man and to sit back and think about what you're doing with what's left of it (life, that is).
And then, your most dreaded nightmare comes true. You fall in love again...
No comments:
Post a Comment