As pleasing and goose-bumps giving as it sounds, let’s
face it, we don’t really want to hear it anymore. I mean you’re just sitting
there in your spot, brain dead from a tiring Thursday, lifelessly racing your
thumb across your touch screen on Facebook/Instagram and half-heartedly ‘liking’
those pictures from a serene European holiday of your pretty friend with a
perfect life (which doesn’t help much), and then you come across something
saying ‘Don’t exist, live’, which at that point really translates as ‘Yeah, right’.
So what’s keeping us from “living”? I guess the idea
of unending conditionality can be part reason; it’s effectively the easiest
trap that keeps us from the present. We’re imperfect humans, and we can’t help
but place conditions on each step forward and we let our whole lives depend on
it. Before one set of emotions sink in, we’re already thinking about what next. We lose ourselves in a
maddening rat race, where everyone’s fighting their own battles, running
towards an unseen finish line which maybe the norm but does it let you live?
It doesn’t have to be melodramatic. All it takes is
little gestures, perhaps; nurturing something that really indulges you (even if
that means reading up on African tribes), valuing people who work in sync with
you, who make life easier for you, be it giving a chocolate to the watchman who’s
been staying up for you all night, or simply giving a lift to someone headed in
your direction. None of this takes you away from the race, probably just makes
the struggle worth it.
But there’s more to living. Deciding against a
stroll in the park nearby, thinking it’s no big deal because it’s not like it’d
be as good as one on the white sandy beaches of California, isn’t quite the way
to live. The world sure as hell is a great treat to travel around but wanting
to do that should be no reason to disregard and let go of the smaller yet similar
forms of pleasure.
Fact is that we’re over-exposed to fancy worldly
cuisines and glamorous destinations in islands we can’t geographically locate, drool-worthy
apparels and accessories that represent impossibly perfect appearances,
cosmetics that apparently work as magic wands, and almost everything that we’re
chasing after, because why not? It’s absolutely normal and human to dream and
want the perfect and ideal life, but does that really need to be the only criteria
for self contentment? Like everything else, can’t we multi-handle dreaming and
working towards the ‘perfect’ life along with living what we can for now? It’s
amazing to dream of waking up in a beach resort, or riding a hot air balloon in
Turkey, as long as we don’t let our dreams de-glamourise our present.
We cannot forget that we’ve happily sailed and grown
through a time when we were a li’l less tech-savvy, when a hashtag meant
nothing more than a useless button on our Nokia phones, when street food seemed
as heavenly as a Michelin-star dish would, and when we actually spent more time
with our friends in person than on group chats. Maybe because with less, we
live more.
