"What is Life Without the Pursuit of a Dream?" - Vanilla Sky

Acknowledgement: I am aware that by posting the following, I risk angering/offending certain individuals. Know that this is not directed at any specific person/persons. It is meant to be a catalyst to changing one's outlook, not to critique one's lifestyle or judge one by one's choices.

Today, between classes, I decided to give my mother a call and ask her if she would like to go out to lunch. We had a rendez-vous at Mitchell's about ten minutes later. It was an overall pleasant lunch, despite about five minutes of hostile bickering [this IS still my mother and myself, after all, and that's to be expected]. I love intellectual conversation, and my mother is always a good source for that. We spoke of the following topic for a bit, and I was inspired to post about it and elaborate a bit more on here.


Survival versus living.
Are you living? Or, are you just surviving?
The two are completely separate states of being.

Living is not necessarily blissful happiness.
Living is taking risks, loving, straying from the norms.
Living is deep appreciation of the little things.
As said in Vanilla Sky, "What is life without the pursuit of a dream?"
Living is the pursuit of a dream, of YOUR dreams, of your wildest fantasies as if all were possible or attainable simply by your own determination and making.

Existence is fleeting and time so precious.
So, why do people contentedly settle for mediocrity and waste so much time being so ordinary?
Why do people "give up" so easily?
How can you hear "no" once, and then walk away and figure that it'll never work out and it's not meant to be?
How can you even bear to take "no" for an answer?

When did you let your day job become your career?
When did you give up those dreams you once had?
Didn't you once dream of being something greater than this?!
Go back to school!
Apply for your dream job!

Also, those surviving among us often feel that if something is meant to be, it's going to come to them. It will be fated and occur regardless of their actions. This also could not be farther from the truth. The fates owe you no favors. You will continue to wait until your dying day.
Be brazen. Take the risk.

The surviving often waste so much time indulging in such ordinary pleasures as well. What could you be doing instead of 'partying'/drinking/doing drugs incessantly? [I will not put on the false pretense that I NEVER drink or never 'party,' however, it's in moderation, and as of late, has been a very seldom occurrence. I felt myself slipping into the pit of survival not that long ago, and I managed to pull myself out. [Survival is tempting, as it's easy, frivolous, fun. And, living's a real bitch, sometimes.]] There are so many provisions for the wasting of time in modern society. Calculate, roughly, this equation, if you can:

Time spent on Myspace/Facebook/any mindless website

+ Time spent watching television

+ Time spent playing video games [yes, Guitar Hero most definitely counts]

+ Time spent drinking/drunk/'partying'

+ Time spent shopping [whether for clothing, CDs, etc.]

= How much time you could have spent bettering your life and yourself this week.

I'm not saying that one should never have any leisure time by any means; that's a one-way ticket to rapid loss of sanity. But, how much leisure time does one need? Could this, perhaps, be a hindrance and a contributing factor to one's failure to live versus survive?

If you are truly content simply surviving, if you wake up in the morning fulfilled and are excited for the day to begin, if you are genuinely happy with normalcy and mediocrity, then more power to you.

I, for one, could never do/be that. I choose to live.
And, it would be lovely if you would join me.

I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again. - Chumbawumba

If one were never knocked down, one would never learn how to get back up and dust oneself off.

Consider, for a brief moment, your life thus far...
Did every negative experience or 'black' period not make you a stronger person or teach you some valuable lesson? Why then, do we consider such a period as being such a scourge upon us, when in reality, we should be viewing it as a blessing?

And why am I currently having such a monumentously tough time practicing what I preach in regards to this?: Because I'm human. We're remarkable beings. Rather than viewing pain, suffering, sorrow, loss, and the like as a cross to carry, we view them as God striking us down, or the ever-popular "bad luck." It could not be that we have a lesson yet to learn or some skin yet to thicken. Oh no, of course not. We're cursed, unlucky, miserable, WOE IS US.

This is tough love in its most perfect form. This is, literally, the School of Hard Knocks [not the 50 Cent/Tupac one]. This is life schooling us the only way that it knows how. And, sometimes, you need tough love in order to learn. God gives us this tough love because we stubborn creatures sometimes need it in order to reach an understanding of some sort and shan't be bothered with the lesson otherwise.

I've been the eternal learner/seeker of knowledge.
This lesson is just coming harder than most.


C.U.P.S.:
[Completely Unrelated Postscript:]

Vegetarian/Vegan frozen food is delicious whether one is vegetarian/vegan or no.
I highly recommend it.
I'm neither of the two, but every time I eat one, I picture a happy little cow smiling.
To this content bovine, I return the smile and say "Not this time, buddy."
He nods in appreciation and replies, "Thank moooooo very much."

Wow. That was corny/unnecessary. It's time for me to quit while I'm ahead.

Words of Wisdom [/Stupidity]

Don't allow yourself on the computer when you're sad and slightly intoxicated.
You'll post blog entries that you'll have to remove the next morning and hope that nobody actually got to read beforehand.

Cheers, Kurt.

Sometimes, things fall fantastically apart, and sometimes, things fall fantastically into place.
And, sometimes, both occur simultaneously...bringing an uncomfortable sense of not knowing what to do with oneself or what to feel or where one stands.

Life can be summed up best by Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five mantra,
"...and so it goes."

And so it goes...and goes...and goes...