What to do in pastime
It is what hobbies are for, killing the time like a pro. But how the hell a person gets to know about his hobbies, one of the things that I hated the most was to first of all not knowing what they are, and second to look back at a shitty hobby portfolio. I come from a family where if you look at one generation above, they think everything else than working is you running from work. Ahh man! What a bummer! Even I need to sometimes, hide from them, to do what I consider a reasonably good leisure time activity. I don’t know why we take birth into the place we seem alien of, maybe its just the steep gradient in generation gap, after all I come from a third world of the third world. Here, few foreign ideas like agreements between people, are recently introduced. I know how bad it is, but what can I do, you have to do with what you have. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, but when it gives you cocoon, you gotta find a way to make the silk out of it.
Coming back to the idea of passing time, why is that we are finding ways and trying to figure out what to do next, what to do something new, something novel, always, like literally always. There are always these hunches to just do something new, which can keep us busy, even if it just doesn’t make sense. A voice comes from behind "I should learn how to swim, it would be nice to float and swim in rivers", if I ask that person why do you want to do that, he’ll say I want to do something with my spare time, and more importantly I think swimming is essential. But this is not the real reason he wants to swim for. I mean he started this with a naive thought, there isn’t any objectivity to his making the decision of swimming. It was not like he wanted to cross a hurdle, and for that he learned swimming and then crossed his hurdle. It was not the mean to an end, it was an end in Itself.
These thoughts, our hunches pulling us in all sorts of directions, and ironically with all these new things getting added to our schedules, we still get left with enough time to get bored and look for what not. What crazy weird thing is going on here. I don’t know exactly but one thing is clear, the people having tendency to add new things in their already busy schedules for improving on them getting bored, is in itself a sort of pattern. Look at it carefully, where does one stop with it. Today I want to do swimming, tomorrow hiking, then basketball, and later I want to fuck like a porn star. Where are these all of our involvements going to converge and fit in together, leaving the consideration that they ever going to be harmonious together, to make the life better, given a person only wants peace. Pattern!, there is!
Let’s go little deep! I want you to think about a person in jail. He has a family who visits him every week. His son is in high school, wife is a doctor. What is it that he can have in life, what can he ask for, except his release. What would I have, even, what would you have. I can at most, that too being very optimistic and positive, would ask for books, some job that they can offer, any volunteering activities if I could get, any field work - to meet people. I mean, of course the person doesn’t has the liberty to do anything, but can we say that his life can’t be more lived than ours. Don’t you think that the life lived by a person, at some level, doesn’t even depend on his circumstances, his attitude and approach towards life is what can make him making the most of what, no person could even achieve with being a free man. Attitude huh!
Let’s go more deep!! I am a man with few needs, few want and few passions. Either I can work on what I want from life or I can wait for what life wants from me. Either way, eventually I’m gonna get what I’ve set myself for. I can work for - to get money, to get prestige, to get power, to get novelty, to get pleasure, to get peace. Or!. I can not work to get minimal, to just survive, to keep wandering, to just exist in ecology. What ever path I choose, consequences, I am going to face. I can kill someone to get in jail or can save someone to get saved some other day. I can work on building my house, I can work for destroying someone’s. I can choose to be a good person, I can reason to be the bad ass. I can be what I want to be, by working for it, by working for my wants, by working on my needs, by working towards my passions. I can have leisure, I cannot have leisure. I can be a showoff, I can be the real deal. Its up to me what I choose to do, with what I have, to make of it what I want and to rest in peace. OR!. I can choose to do what I think I want, with what I don’t have and stay in turmoil. I choose to be a swimmer, I choose to be a hiker, I choose to learn a language, to not be what I wanted to be but, to not be what I became after choosing the last thing to be. Vivekananda said that even one whole life is short for fully manifesting a single idea. But what are we trying to do is to be everything, that quantumizes us, to not be whole, but shreds, bits and pieces of nothing.
