inspiration

I started this site almost a year ago. Originally I thought that I had a lot of things to share with whoever want to read it. I had grand plans to post a new essay every day; or at least several times a week.

Instead, I’ve gone several weeks between updates. Not for lack of anything to say, but lack of motivation to share. I’ve become extremely apathetic towards the world I live in. I often feel alone in my efforts to enjoy life to its fullest, and not get bogged down by the silliness of human existence.

My great uncle passed away this weekend. I was never terribly close to the man. I’ve seen him maybe twice in the last ten years. This man was part of my family, and I never made an effort to approach him. Now he’s gone, and I’ll never learn from him what it was like to be a prisoner of war. I’ll never learn anything from him now. And in a dozen years, few people will even care that he had ever lived.

I’m painfully aware of my own mortality. I lay awake almost every evening dreading my death. My limbs become numb, my vision falters, and my heart races. I am literally incapacited by my fear of death. I think to myself that I’ve only got another fifty years to do anything in this world.

I don’t want to spend the next fifty years doing trivial things. I don’t want to spend the next fifty years working in a job I don’t like, just so I can buy things I don’t need. When I’m dead, it won’t matter one bit what kind of car I drove, or what kind of clothes I wore. No one will care whether or not I preferred Tommy Hilfiger over the Gap. Watching Friends every week won’t make my passing any more bearable.

I get sleepy in the afternoon, and I want to take a nap. Then I think that those few hours will be wasted on my couch. I’ll have done nothing with my life for those few hours, and I’ll never be able to reclaim them. I get in a fight with a loved one, and that time is gone forever - time that could have been spent doing something wonderful with a wonderful person.

Even though I count off the wasted moments, I still take that nap. I still obstinately refuse to compromise with my loved one. I still lie in bed staring at my ceiling. I could read a book and improve myself. I could bite my tongue and make someone else happy for a change. I could volunteer. Hell, I could do anything just so long as I was doing something.

But I don’t. I expect to receive some sort of divine inspiration. I expect that the right things will be done because I’ll want to do them. The bitch of it is that the right things to do are generally the hardest. It’s hard to swallow pride and apologize for doing something stupid. It’s hard to focus on self-improvement when the effort doesn’t seem to match the immediate payoff. Sitting on my couch drinking a beer and watching a movie is infinitely more satisfying in the short term, at the expense of a wasted evening in the long run.

I must not be alone in my laziness, for I see evidence of it wherever I look. I just wonder how different the world would be if we all kept our own mortality squarely in mind throughout any activity … Would things be better or worse?