Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Life Upside Down

The other day I did something that I haven't done in years! I laid on the couch with my legs in the air and let my head hang over the edge so that when I looked around, everything seemed upside down. The dining room chandelier poked from the ground and Waldo played with his kong on the ceiling. After a while, Waldo just started looking at me while I was watching him sit on the ceiling. Then I looked out the window at the upside down tree & laughed. Quite a silly thing to do.

Sometimes life seems a little like that when you think about it. I notice it a lot now that I'm going to be graduating soon. People ask me what I'm  going to do after school & where I'm going to work. We have a tendancy to talk about ourselves in reference to our work. To me it seems like such an obsurd idea. We talk about work like it's one of the central things that define us, meanwhile I've never heard of anyone on thier deathbed saying, "You know, I spent too much time with my family, I wish I would have worked more." 

What does work lead to? It leads to money which generally leads to stuff, which eventually wears out & breaks. (Side note: I'm not in anyway denying the fact that money can be used to help people, I'm just making a general statement.) So if we define ourselves by our work, then in an extension we can define ourselves by our stuff. Look in the media, especially advertizing. The emphasis is mostly on stuff, specifically getting bigger and/or better stuff. 

When stuff breaks, it eventually ends up in a landfill. Sometimes society does that to broken people too. Society can just push them away & I think it's sad. Material things eventually break down & lose their meaning, but it doesn't have to be that way with people. In a way, people are simple to fix. When it boils down to it, when you show someone love or kindness they regain a bit of what was lost. I'm not saying it's that quick, it happens over time. But what if we all shifted our focus from work & stuff to caring for people? What a world that would be...

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