We take our first breath, and the first thing we see is our mother’s face and florescent lights.
All of a sudden there’s all these lights and shades and colors and sounds, The only way we know how to react is by wailing and crying.
God only knows if out of fear or awe, I’d say it was fear for sure if only we knew at the time what was to follow this overwhelming moment.
In the blink of an eye we’re living the life.
Being fed on command, cleaned on command, and held on command. Anything we want is there and it’s available, we’re privileged beings. As if that wasn’t enough, we play, explore and discover all day long, sleep when we want and stay up as we like. The world is open to us and we just take and take and take. Like a little privileged sponge. Most are even lucky to be smothered in love and have the reward of awe, hugs, and kisses to every achievement, no matter how little, is accomplished. These are the best days of our life.
We soon find ourselves in a uniform, at the cost of time and achievements, life is now controlled by a schedule.
We leave home in the morning, get on a bus full of other confused beings, and are driven to a building.
At this building we are expected to imitate a larger being and do what we’re told. Rewards for success are handed down a lot less now, and so begins the endless routine.
For the first time ever we’re scolded at by one of these larger beings, either from home or at that building that we now know is called a “School”.
We’re still expected to imitate what the larger person does but now we also mostly do what is told.
The rewards are slowly disappearing they’ve been replaced by letters and sometimes numbers, the higher your number or letter is the better you were than everyone else.
We arrive home from this “School” and we go by the routine, except the work has now somehow followed us to our sanctuary. We’re denied the things we want, without reason, instead of being rewarded for good things we’re punished for the things that other people don’t like. Confusion starts to hit.
It feels like it’s been forever at this school, we finally understand this whole process, more or less, we’re taken into groups as easily as we’re kicked out from them, we feel attracted to other people, we love, we lose, we love again. We’re expected to do what everyone else is doing and act like everyone else is acting. We’re judged based on how similar we are to all the “Normal People” and to them we’re never similar enough, One day we’re outcasts and the next we’re surrounded by admirers, only to realize that we’ve become outcasts once again. We start comparing the Physical pain tied to injuries from playing and discovering to Emotional pain after we’re rejected, after we’re neglected, after we fail, after we make any mistake, a mistake everyone seems to be waiting so eagerly for.
We’re not confused anymore we begin to see the nightmare we’re beginning to walk into. No these are not the best days of our lives.
We’re soon free to make decisions again, We’re at even bigger institutions, all that we’ve learned till this day is that we’re supposed to be learning, but here we are still doing what the “bigger” person is asking us to do. Constantly we’re told that we’re being prepared for a this thing called “Life” but if you asked any of us at this point if we were ready, we wouldn’t even know if we weren’t. This being said they still think we’re capable of knowing flat out, what we wanted to “Learn” to do in the future.
The biggest rewards and punishments these days are those Numbers and Letters we were shown a while back but now they feel different, a low number or letter was just as painful as being scolded at, and a high letter or number was just as cheerful as a gold star on our paper.
Constant fear that these scores will decide your entire future are always in play.
We start to wish we could go back, “like woah, this train is moving to fast how do I get off??”
We’re no longer dependent beings, we now have a “Job” something we fought very hard for, It’s nothing like we always wanted but something has to pay the bills.
We have less and less time, throwing away our health to earn and save worthless paper, it’s valuable, but worthless nonetheless.
The numbers and letters are gone there is no reward and punishment anymore, instead you now either make more of that paper or you lose a lot of it. And our importance and status is decided on having earned a lot, saved a lot and spent a lot of this paper.
nothing really has changed the situations have been substituted but we’re used to the judgment and expectations of others.
Life is difficult now at the end of this seemingly endless journey.
we’re not as strong as we remember being, we’re not in control of our kids as much as we’d like to be, things still don’t go our way, but we feel as though we’ve accomplished something.
Maybe it’s not just an illusion as we thought it might be. Maybe we actually made a difference in this world, but then again maybe it was an illusion and we really didn’t do anything that special besides maybe working on the clock, raising kids, and working on the clock even longer. Let’s face it, we’ve lost this long board game, we put in everything we had, our lives, and it’s just now we realize we’ve lost.
Here we are in a bed staring at those same florescent lights again, barley breathing. Our life flashes before our eyes. . . .
Back to every day except this one “The good old days”
when we were young and had all the time in the world and all the energy we could ever need, and soon after that to the teen years where we had less time but still a lot of energy, we soon became adults with no time and little energy, but here we are now with all the time once again and no energy to do anything about it. How could we be foolish enough to waste all this time alive but not have lived a single day of our lives. We wasted our health for money that we would spend on our health so that we could waste it even more. What did we contribute to our lives?
With a last breath we look back to that first day opening our eyes, we realize, we may have opened our eyes. . . . but not for a single day after that were we ever born, except for now. . . but it’s too late, and with that being said our eyes close shut.
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