So about waking up

Waking up to life means appreciating it in all of its magnificence as well as its insignificance. Life is a gift. It seems possible that I never had to exist; that my mother if having never met my father might have then married another and birthed another, or may have never ended up giving birth at all. Actually, it seems there are an endless number of scenarios in which I, in fact, may have never been born. For each and every person on this earth there is nothing tangible but the present. We have no recollection of what happened before our birth and we certainly have no recollection of what will happen after our death. All we have is this gift of life. We have no real explanation for it, I mean we may have come accross the right explanation but we can't prove its correctness. We have tried; there are obviously a number of hypotheses. Yet, not one of these can be proved, and most can only be justified by faith. Faith is powerful but it is possible that it could fail us. To this degree we don't have much to go off of other than that which were given, or happened upon. Life.

It makes me feel sandwiched really. On one end of the spectrum, before my birth, there was nothing. Then there's me now, alive (the only thing I know). And then on the other end of the spectrum there is death, another void. I have maybe 80 or so years of this, barring any unforseen circumstances, and then it's over. This is the same for every person that has been born and is to be born. As far as we know, we only have this one life. We might have faith that we will be born again but like I said before; faith may fail us. That is reality. Even if reincarnation does happen to be a correct assumption about life, we don't remember our other lives and thus we still only have this one.

Existence is precious. To exist is phenomenal. It IS a once in a life time chance, pun intended. We don't know why we were given the chance to live only that we have it. The worst part is that we take life for granted. We shouldn't but we do. I believe that if we knew we were taking it for granted, we would think about not taking it for granted. Perhaps we would even wake up.

That is why this blogg is called wakeuptolive. Because everyone of us, myself included, owes it to themselves to wake up. It isn't easy. I don't claim to know exactly how to wake up, but I do believe that I'm figureing it out.

It begins with a paradox. Two thoughts, or in this case concepts, that we know should contradict but in fact do not. Freedom. Freedom can be defined as the condition of being free of contraints. Control is the opposite. Or at least we have been conditioned to believe that it is.

In America, and in most of the "free" world, we believe the human being should be allowed to do as he pleases; at least as long as he does so without harming another. We brake this rule all the time but it is still a sort of unspoken rule of humanity. The problem is that we often taken freedom for granted and we abuse it. I am speaking specifically of certain kind of freedom, personal freedom. To often we yes to ourselves. We hardly ever say no. For whatever reason, and I have my hypotheses, we always want to say yes to whatever desire presents it self in our minds. We want to eat that piece of cake even when we know the consequences. We don't want to volunteer (though there are those who go because they want to do something good) because we'd rather hang out with our friends or watch TV, even though we know what we should do; when the opportunity arises to have sex or to do drugs, we often want to say yes and do even though we know the consequences. "Yes" is abused and no is almost never used. If we do use no we use it for the wrong reasons, we use it because we think we should not because we believe we should, and there in lies the problem.

I'm tired, but I'm nowhere near finished. Until next time.

for life and for love