DE-LIBERATE

"When Walt and Billie suggested that he needed a college degree to attain a fulfilling career, Chris answered that careers were demeaning "twentieth-century inventions", more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you."  

Although I had continued to read the next lines, I was stuck with these words. Long after I had finished reading the book. While eating every one of my meals after that moment. I feel crassly humiliated to bide my time "living deliberately",  just because we have to, just because the rest of them are, only because we need to self-identify with the archetypal materialist in order to get acceptance. 

"Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you." Who has the time to relate to a circumstance, anyway? All of us know what "one" would do in every possible situation. We KNOW so well, that if someone fails to follow the protocol, we would sincerely shun them out of our safe little deliberate lives. 

People have become as religious about their "careers" these days, as they are about funerals. Of course, we're all expected to know what happens at one. "One" has to look anguished, puff up their eyes crying over the dead person, even if they hadn't really spoken to them while they were alive."The poor dead person wants to let everyone know he is still alive and may become quite perturbed when no one around his body is trying to listen to him, which is only reasonable, of course" reads, a funny excerpt from one of Aghori Vimalananda's speeches. No one is concerned with relating to the experience, as they are with playing out their parts. Equivalently, we're supposed to be ambitious for a "career", do whatever it takes to progress, well that's the protocol. No one cares to have a relationship with work, as long as they have a "career" to comfort them.

"Tere ko career chahiye, aur mere ko carrier" says, a drug peddler in a movie I happened to see recently. We're all very delighted to trade our lives in exchange of a "career", aren't we? Life here does not refer to the longevity of it. Our personal relationship with all the situations we're faced with, collectively accounts for Life as a whole, no matter how long it lasts. At 24, just a couple of years out of college, Chris McCandless penned a brief adios on the blank page of a book he was reading, in an abandoned trailer in the North Pole: "I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!" and I had believed him. 

"  I'll take this soul that's inside me now
    Like a brand new friend
    I'll forever know

    I've got this light
    And the will to show
    I will always be better than before

    Long nights allow me to feel...
    I'm falling...I am falling
    The lights go out
    Let me feel
    I'm falling
    I am falling safely to the ground  "