The future is funny, don’t you think?
Not in a literal sense, I mean. I’m just saying that in general. After all, no one really knows what’s going to happen before it happens, right? Sure, we can try and predict things…but after it’s all said and done, it will always be fate who decides how the cookie crumbles. All we can do is try and convince the cookie that it should crumble the way we want it to.
“Control the controllable,” that’s what Gram used to say.
Oh, Gram. How dearly do I envy the world you lived in. A time before all this hustle and bustle. When all folks cared about was whether or not the family they were raising had enough grain for the season and if the sow in the barn was ripe for eatin’, having tended to its old life’s last litter. The stories you tell make my mind wander every which way, wondering if I’ll ever get to live in a world like that.
It’s kind of disheartening, you know? To spend almost every waking moment trying to figure out what bills have been paid and which ones haven’t, and whether or not I’m going to have some collector call me about something I forgot to pay fifteen thousand years ago. I exaggerate, of course, but I know you know what I mean.
I just wish we could redo it all. Start from the ground up, no? Craft a world where people actually care about stuff they should care about, rather than all this mumbo jumbo we’ve been trained to value. It’s sad, really. It’s like we somehow just let the bad guys win, watching our kids and peers from the sidelines as they’re taught that the type of logo on someone’s shirt somehow determines the quality of person they are. I just don’t get how we made it here. And I even more don’t get how it happened right in front of our eyes, but somehow still managed to become the commonly accepted way of conducting oneself. Why do we constantly judge each other based upon these things? Ugh. I digress.
But it makes me wonder…does it even matter who we are? Good or bad, I mean. Because I won’t lie to you, trusted journal…it definitely seems like no one really cares what type of person you are, as long as you have the ability to give people stuff that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to acquire.
So what is it? What actually is the meaning that we all desperately search for? Are we all just supposed to fall in line, accepting the fact that a persons monetary value is directly correlated with their intrinsic value?
Personally, I want to say no. But sometimes this world makes me think otherwise.
Sometimes, I’ll lay down on my back porch, just looking at the stars. I used to try and count them, but I eventually realized that it didn’t matter how many of them there were. All that matters is that they’re up there, looking back down at me, and that someone, somewhere, is probably asking themselves that same question. You know…in some kind of alien language.
What makes a person a “good” person?
And that’s just it, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to try and figure this stuff out? Or are we supposed to just skirt by in life, blissfully ignorant to the grander question of what defines us?
I don’t know. Really…I don’t. Maybe there’s no right answer to that, and that this finite life should just be appreciated for what it is. Perhaps the irony is in worrying about it, because all it does is (most likely) shorten our time here.
Stress is a real problem, indeed.
How the World Should Work 