By Tamika Watts
The first time I realised I spent most of my time thinking, rather than living, was the year after I graduated school.
I was already in retail and I had just picked up many more hours. I didn’t enjoy what I was doing, in fact, I hated it. I hated even putting my uniform on. When I would finish a shift, I’d deliberately hang my uniform up and put it away in the wardrobe so that the sight of it wouldn’t remind me of work. I spent hours and hours at work thinking about quitting; thinking about all the things I really wanted to do but that I just never made happen.
It’s easy to do: to dream about what you should be doing, rather than actually doing it. Things like, ‘I’ve been meaning to get a new job’… ‘Get a gym membership’… ‘Eat healthy’. How often do we put these thoughts into practice?
We seem to spend so much time caught up in mundane routines that we can never seem to break. Like that horrible, repetitive dream that keeps playing all night and you just can’t wake yourself up to exit the horrible, tedious loop.
When you think back on your recent life is there ever really anything that comes to mind except, ‘what did you do with your weekend’?
To which you say, bored, ‘I worked’.
Even as you say it, the mere thought makes you grimace because you know you have to do it all again tomorrow.
I was startled into realising the loop I was living in when I recently read Fight Club – a read way overdue. It was just one of those things I’d been meaning to do.
What really remains in my mind though, is the moment (spoiler alert) when the narrator holds a gun to the store clerk, Raymond K. Hessel’s head, Hessel is reborn in this moment. He gets a chance to start again when the narrator says:
‘How did you want to spend your life? If you could do anything in the world… A vet, you said. You want to be a vet…You could be in school working your ass off, Raymond Hessel, or you could be dead. You choose… I know who you are. I know where you live. I’m keeping your license, and I’m going to check on you, mister Raymond K. Hessel. In three months, and then six months, and then a year, and if you aren’t back in school on your way to being a veterinarian, you will be dead …
Raymond K. K. Hessel, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you’ve ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your life.”
The philosophy, put blandly is: If you’re not doing what you want to do in life, then you may as well be dead because you’re not really living your life anyway.
What a wonderful, horrible reason to make your life what you always wanted it to be. Why would it take some great, life-threatening or life-changing event to make some of us stop thinking about it and actually begin to make the changes we’ve always wanted?
Is it fear? Fear of change? Fear that, maybe, what you think you want isn’t actually what you want? Or is it just lack of motivation? Is the thought of doing these things enough effort and the doing part too much?
I’m still in that job I hate. I still say I’m going to do something different but I haven’t yet. A year has gone by and I’m still saying the same thing. Which leads me to the scary thought: How much time passes by without our realising and without doing the things that make us happy? Too much. I’m caught in that continuous, mundane loop and I’m just hoping I wake up soon.
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