Reflections on a cold winter night before Work

Routines:

Now is later. I keep telling myself, I’ll write another post tonight, well tomorrow morning, tomorrow night…. Wait it’s been 3 months. Life rushes by us. It’s been repeated for ages, when you’re young, time crawls by. For a youngster their frame of reference is shorter, we measure our experience in terms of our own realization. That is to say that for us we understand life in relation to the amount of time we’ve spent. When you’re eight, time crawls by because hell, there’s 78 more years to live and each day seems to crawl by because you’ve only experienced 2920 of them. As you grow older, you see a quarter century, then half, then ¾ then if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see a whole century… that’s a whole lot of days, and they start to blur together. We start to put time in relation, a day isn’t that much, and it’s not so special…. When those words leave your mouth, you know you’re in trouble.

A close friend of mine told me that the last six months of his life just flew by, and he couldn’t understand how it went by so fast. He was worried, because to him that meant that he wasn’t making the best of the days he had. Each day of his life, was marked by the same routine, he was on autopilot…. How many of us feel that each day? How many times do we remember the drive to work, or the endless routine of breakfast, lunch, and then home (if we’re lucky) for dinner. Our routines become us, we become human’s doing, not humans being. It’s not just about relaxing. Each day should be special. Reserved. If we lose touch with that… well. That’s a tough thought. If we lose touch with ourselves, our being, there’s not much left to live for.

Part of it may be our culture, after all throughout life we’re taught to put off our dreams, our goals until we make enough money. Put ourselves into a routine, don’t be the nail head sticking up, work hard and defer your goals, then one day you’ll make it and can live your goals… well what happens when you’re too old to take advantage of the system. When you’ve lost yourself in your routine, and forgotten your goals… a lot of minds find themselves lost and unable to recover. The highest suicide rate among 25 to 50 yr olds are highly successful men. Men who made their fortunes, but have no idea what to do with it.

What can that tell us about our future? About our place in the world? What can that help us understand?