Actualization

What motivates you?

Do we all have a secret act that proves key to our continued life and happiness within it? I am beginning to believe so, though it is unfortunate. For those of us lucky enough to have discovered what it is that keeps us moving forward in the cliched sense, life must truly be a wonder. If I had ever felt that what was naturally interesting was the best way to push on in life, I would have been struck down with surprise. Continuing that personal note, I have never understood why someone would sacrifice their own personal happiness for any reason, and yet I find myself continually confronted with the idea that without that said sacrifice, happiness is not only a frightfully complex process, but also one that appears simply impossible to achieve.

When I was younger, I remember wondering how it is that people who do a very simple, uninteresting, and repetitive task for their living prevent themselves from going insane. The answer now, I find, is that they are self-anesthetized to their own life. Numb to the idea that their life is now less than what they once believed it could be. The sagging shoulders of a soul that could once have balanced the infinite weight of the world. Can we be so easily broken? Are some of us just not built for success?

Some would say that an element of fate enters into the situation, that yes, success and happiness is just not on the cards for everyone. I say that we have built a world that crushes those that are even fractionally fragile, leaving behind living stepping stones to be used by the next, most ambitious soul. Fate has little to do with life when life is a series of emotionally and intellectually crippling hammer blows and little else. How can we be expected to stay afloat when there is no interest from our fellow man in the continued well-being of others?

For now, I see the mundane as a blessing. When you are without thought or interest, your life becomes a miracle of simplicity. That simplicity is the future of most, and while at first it might seem a less than positive truth, eventually we all learn to embrace it. Mediocrity is not as terrible as it is made out, and happiness is as just as much "not for everyone" as "success" is a predetermined ideal.