Hamsters on a wheel

Life has become really hectic now days. We are all always moving, all always running after something, so much that there isn’t even enough time to do the things that we really love to do. It’s not just the grownups who are guilty of running around endlessly in circles but the young ones too. We force our young to compete for pretty much everything. The main lesson we all get as students is that either you keep up or are left behind; so we start to run from a really early age, the running becomes such a habit that we are unable to quit running even after we finish our so called education.

It’s not just with education that we are forced to compete but for every other aspect of social life. As we enter into adulthood, there is the added responsibility of getting a good job, building up assets and then settling down for a boring life of monotonous work and work and then some more work which leaves us no more than machines in a factory. Work isn’t bad at all, but too much work takes its toll on you over time, also too much work will leave you a workaholic who doesn’t really get to do anything significant other than work. Our interests and our passions die out really agonizing deaths as they rot in some corner of our brains, we console ourselves by saying that we are too busy but this busy life comes at what cost?

After we apparently choose to get married, we have to start off with a family, and then with the coming of children come the added responsibilities. Our experience in life is again thrust down the throats of our children who are also forced to run like hamsters on a wheel. We tell them that it’s absurd to dream and that they have to run along if they want to survive. Is survival the only goal for a human life? Now that we have managed to master and conquer every known environment, we replace one kind of survival with another, isn’t this life supposed to be worth much more than just survival and sustenance? Where are the dreams of our children and the dreams that we once had?

Time passes really fast and we find that we have done very little of what we once dreamt to do. Lost in this race, we forget ourselves and become like an unidentifiable face in the crowd with nothing new to offer to this world. This rat race that we choose to constantly run along in has done more damage than we will give it credit to. We are unaware of the world we live in; we have knowledge that is often limited to what we are, what we do and where we have been. Our struggles with life and what it entails have been narrowed down our horizons to such an extent that we are afraid to dream about things that seem distant.

When was the last time you took a REAL vacation, one where you did not have to worry about getting back to work and getting back to the race? Well I’m positive that many of us have not had that kind of a vacation since our school and college days, and even then there was always the added pressure of the results always looming above. We have become like machines, we go and do the same things every day but even the best machines need to slow down once in a while and get a taste of what leisure really feels like. Even the best machines need to cool off once in a while, this life is too short to be wasted away doing things that are commonplace, we are all special and we all need to follow that uniqueness within us, only then will we lead lives that are fulfilling and do justice to our potential at the same time. Life is too short to waste doing things that we are told to do, to do things that everyone else does, we need to give ourselves time so we can admire how beautiful life really is, how beautiful we are and how beautiful our world really is.

Ask yourself… why are you hurrying through life at such a breathless pace? The life you are living is not a trial run that you want to zoom through so you can come back and run the real deal – you get one chance, remember to enjoy the journey and make the most of it!

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows: