life's too short to be complacent...
which is what I told my boss today when he started teasing me for being slightly demanding and wanting to finish the job. It wasn't exactly what I meant to say, but the more I tried to untie my tongue the more I liked what I had said, so lets look it up...complacent: Self-satisfied; contented; kindly; as, a complacent temper; a complacent smile.(this according to websters unabridged dictionary...so you see I had it right on some level. I was being complacent to just sit there and be satisfied to do nothing, to not finsh what I had sarted...And too me that is just a waste of time...so what I meant was life's too short to be satisfied...but more like, satisfied with the norm, satisfied with the world and society that others tell you to live in. I think its time to take charge. I think that this is why I am so drawn to travel, why I feel that once I get to spain, that rope that is forever pulling me towards every alcove of the world will succeed. Because i'm tired of being complacent and just following society's path through school and straight into a life of endless work in a job which pays some desperate homage to the dreams you had of YOUR life. An education is not found within a classroom, a typical classroom that is...It is the experience of life, that is education, it is learning about the cultures of the world by traveling it and befriending its endless characters, learning history through the voices of its children, and economics by becoming sustainable...to make friends, to see what most people would never imagine is waiting for them...so fighting complacency is a positive thing...it is expanding, it is fulfilling the most important part of existance, LIVING, to its maximum ability. So why does some voice keep telling me that traveling is just running away, desguised as some noble effort to grow? what would I be running away from? family? No because, despite my desires to be as far and disconnected from them as possible, I do love them and it would be weird to not have that close by. Friends? absolutely not, because they are the ones who keep me sane. Besides, if anything, i'm running to more friends, though they are lost in some faceless, nameless fog which has yet to clear. What I'm running away is only this neatly blocked out life that my parents, my professors, hell, society as a whole, has laid before me...I'm running away from a 5 year masters degree because it means nothing to me...so i could read, memorize and ace an exam. So what? could I use it...could I walk into spain and expect to know their life because i read about their culture in a class??? to me there is no satisfaction in that. It is some pseudo knowledge that we pay tens of thousands of dollars for and all we recieve in return is an expensive sheet of paper, almost as empty as the "education" that we just recieved. And education continues. I do not want to be complacent and accept the job that will follow college, I do not want to be self-content because how can you possibly live your life to the fullest degree if you are the only person who can ever make you content? There is so much more beyond our own individual sphere of awareness, and the only way to see that is through the life of another...so i aim to be extra-satisfied...or satisfied by the connections i make with others...something like that....sorry the clarity is disappearing...peace all