Bottling it up

Bottling it up

Every once in a few months I ask myself the question I currently fear most: what have I been doing with my life?

............

Moments later I realized my breathing had stopped in pace with my frozen thoughts. The stillness condenses into a blush which blooms a sweat along my spine.

Damn. This occurred more frequently after entering an ivory tower where material rewards nearly disappear, and silence grips me whenever I find myself. Then alternately exposed, too quickly, to the fancies of the "real world", always encrusted with a thick layer of showiness.

How do you crack an rock? Alternately heat and cool its exterior with ruthless haste. Do it enough and you will find shards or crumbs. Useless knowledge about geography still mocks me after all these years.

Again! "What were the past 27 years spent achieving?" This time, much louder, followed by a decidedly painful silence. Water starts dripping down my face.

I, like most of my peers, am a multi-millionaire: I've already been given beyond 14 million minutes to decide the answer to this question. Too many gone, too few remaining. Five million were spent sleeping. Nearly two million were consumed away. With my memory probably holding less than tens of thousands of minutes worth, I wonder about the squandered remainder.

I forcefully bottle up this minute's worth of panic, suddenly resolved to act; wishing away this dread, knowing its shadow will seek me again.

Reaching for the towel, I step out of the shower and begin my promised new day.

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Friends

Range - View from Sulphur Mountain, Banff.

Who do we consider our friends: people who care about us or whom we can get along? One condition does not strictly guarantee the other. We sometimes find ourselves having to tolerate our friends when one of these two conditions are starkly absent. But tolerate we do, if only to sustain a lazy habit, or subjugate to peer pressure.

I've seldom sought new friendships, even though I like meeting new people. Meeting new faces erases the tiring recurrence of bad habits and social bullying. Perhaps this is why I like traveling. It affords a temporary escape from my habits. But, I digress. This, after all, is a blog.

I've only come to realize the influence friends exert on my life. I start to behave more like them, or less like them, but never unchanged. I tend to either strongly agree, sometimes without reason, or strongly disagree, usually with unthinking haste. The latter situation is nearly always a precursor to the end of an the friendship.

It is a compulsory struggle which bears upon me. I am strangely disturbed by my inability to stay constant, or to hazard a cliche: "stay true to myself", whatever "true" and "myself" may mean to the world. If my "true self" is merely a composite of past prejudices, should I accept influence of friendships as a personality gained from my history?

If we do become our friends, or take on some of their dominant qualities, should we not surround ourselves with positive people whom we can get along? Which brings us back to my first question: what about our friends whom we care about but exhibit very negative personalities? After all, friendships are about "being there" and "support" and other terms which go well with Saturday morning cartoons. Maybe we should also grow such a positivism in ourselves, so that our more negative friends can benefit from.

Unless, of course, they are the sort who dislike optimism or constructive opinions. After all, who likes to be told what to do, in this new liberal age?

If these don't work, we can always go with what is most convenient. But to think that we spend so much of our time worrying about our career, our future and finances, should we not devote attention to picking our friends who decide the our personality?

Tough choices with no single solution for every situation.

The mountain range we have to adventure continues into the horizon, with the setting sun blinding our eyes temporarily from the discouragement of the majestic view.

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In the meantime, I've thought about what I want from myself during this lifetime; a lifetime with an unannounced end.

I think my current answer is more specific than my first. Perhaps I am driven by my peers and mentors to seek meaningful creativity with my hands. Standing in the light of their enlightened minds, I wonder how far mine could shine.

And thus I continue to challenge myself.