[P]aradise

These people on Facebook have an obsession with putting cheesy quotes as their captions for their profile pictures that relate nothing to their current lives or the actual picture itself, and sharing it so that they can get more likes. What has this world come to?

It’s human tendency to want to know everything. It’s human nature to conquer everything around us, to dissect and understand every aspect of our lives. The very foundation on which our education system is built upon is this fact. Competition - a test to determine who has a genuine thirst for knowledge.

We learn because we want to survive. Every day brings about a new opportunity in the race towards a cure for cancer, a remedy for AIDS, a prevention to death. Despite what other superficialities may arise in this world, in the grand scheme of things, we are presented with but one task: to survive. And so we try desperately each day to analyze every facet of the world around us in an effort to discern the safe from the harmful. We are more or less driven by fear as to not blindly leap into a trap, condemning this gift we call life.

Yet what I ponder is if this paradigm is at all effective. Through our daily attempts at conquering our environments, are we, in truth, removing ourselves from the natural order of the world? Each day we learn new ideas, new concepts, but at the same time discover mystifications by the thousands. We try so hard to incorporate logic, to produce order out of chaos, yet it seems like we continue to stray from our initial goal. We believe we know much about the mechanisms of this planet, and we claim to be the most intelligent species in existence, yet with countless battles fought over differences in these beliefs, at this point, how can I differentiate between the facts and the lies?

They say with age comes wisdom, but what they - whoever “they” may be - fail to note is that this wisdom does not stem from the knowledge gained through innumerable readings of the Iliad or the Odyssey. This wisdom is birthed from our isolation from the society we’ve grown up in, a reverting back to what scientists would call a more “primitive” time. To utilize the fruits of true understanding, we must first return to nature in its natural and chaotic state, and in that moment when our minds are bombarded by trillions of thoughts at any given moment, then we can see the permanent and absolute joys in life.

We spend too much of our lives dissecting, analyzing every step we plan on taking, years in advance of our fleeting time on this earth. And that is precisely what our lives are - fleeting. We are taught that in this dystopia, only a healthy income of money can make a strong enough basis for our happiness and satisfaction, but these short term pleasures are petty. At this point, we’re not just claiming that we’re the most intelligent species on the planet; we’re claiming we understand what happiness is, we’re proposing the preposterous idea that we have successfully “dissected” the human soul and all the emotions that can be invoked. Why, then, aren’t we able to account for the stimuli that trigger the feeling of love, or sorrow? We cannot simply label things as what we believe them to be; this world isn’t ours, and was never ours to begin with - but I digress.

In essence, we learn because we want to continue living. 30 is the new 40, and wrinkles have suddenly become synonymous with unattractive. But what I still fail to understand is why we deem it crucial to know everything, why we need to find the logic in any given circumstance. Why is it that through this, and only through this are we able to achieve what we name “happiness?” If you observe a common house cat, for example, you’ll find that it is content with just about anything, stretching under the warmth of sunlight, or perhaps leaping like a ballerina from chair to chair. These are, in reality, the very same animals that are ruling over the animal kingdom in savannas, in jungles. So while we think they can’t possibly understand the world as we do, in truth, they meditate nearly every hour of the day, they conceive the world better than we do, they have the ability to survive.

And so I will cast doubts on my current views of the human race when we begin to unravel the mysteries of the world, when our “logic” and “reason” show signs of progress. And just perhaps when our urgency to live outweighs our pride, we might spend our own days stretching under the sun and leaping from chair to chair.