30 seconds posted by imani , Wednesday, September 3, 2008 at 6:52 PM, in Labels: freefall

So yeah. I have been meaning to write for the last couple of days. But each time I try to, a huge chop of the writer’s block would fall on me and knock me unconscious…resulting to…voila…nothing at all.

I want to write. Big time. I just don’t know what to write about. Yet.

And then an idea dawned on me.

30 seconds.

What if our life is meant to be just a 30 second TV commercial. What would we like to put there. What would we do to make everyone understand what that 30-second commercial means to us. Would we even care if people would get the message or not? Are people’s views of what we are more important than the way we understand ourselves?

Okay. Sorry. Did not mean to flog you with all this nonsense. But it is something that we can always consider, right? What if…

Everything in our lives can be compressed to a 30-second commercial. When I was in college I got interested in existentialism. Fundamentally, it tells us that existence precedes essence. That we are able to create our meaning and essence, contrasting the idea that the gods are the ones deciding on our fates for us.

But I know sometimes we leave it to some weird force of nature to take us to the other side of the road. What are we actually expecting? We cannot possibly let a deity rule our lives regardless of how often we leave it up to a Mount Olympus resident.

I know am not really making a lot of sense right now. My brain is as good as a slurpee. Cold and in a liquid state.

So yeah, going back to existentialism. I know that I am not Nietzsche or Kierkegaard expert (I have read Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and I get his drift, but I think he did not get hugged a lot when he was a kid – okay, that’s beside the point) but I think that it’s true. A part of me still believes that some of the things in our lives are fated to occur, whatever it is that we do to avoid it. But at the end of it all – it is our life. And our life is what we make of it.

We have to learn how to not blame those around us (or, more preposterously – nature) for the expletive deleted things that happen to us. Everything is a matter of choice. I know that it is easier said than done, but there is also that gap between cause and effect, between action and reaction. That gap is where we make or break an outcome, where we spoil or perfect a moment.

And it’s all up to us.