Would a map help?

I read this book (I think it was called When You Meet Buddha on the Road Shoot Him – I’m not sure). It began with a thought that has stuck with me – one of the biggest causes of unhappiness is the belief that there is a purpose to our life. There isn’t. Living is what we are meant to do, the ups and downs, the good and bad, the experience of it all is our only purpose. We give ourselves a lot of unhappiness because we try to extract from it something which is not. It is in living that you will actually achieve what you were given life for. That’s the answer to a happy life – just live it.

That’s easy enough to when things are at a level where you feel you can control it- but when the course veers off-track, that’s when I know I have a tendency to look for some other purpose – some higher goal of life. I think it gives me the comfort that things are happening for a reason – that the madness around me is not just a random. Because randomness scares me like nothing else. Because I can’t seem to be able to fence in the extent to which it can be unpleasant. I rarely find myself wanting to fence in the good – no surprises there.

I have gone through a lot of life philosophies – one where I believed I could control life, where I believed I could not control life only myself to one where I believed nothing is in my hands. Today I seem to have settled for a mid-path. I control the route which controls which of the limited end goals I will reach. In other words, I have come to believe my life is like a maze – one of those puzzles we used to solve as kids where you need to find 1 of 3 or four alternative treasures- you can wind down various roads and depending which you will chose, you will get what’s at the end. My hope is that the treasures don’t differ dramatically. My gut is that they do. My wish is that I chose correctly.

Hum of the day
I met a schoolboy of the present-past today. Crisply ironed shirt, well matched shoes and trousers, neat hair, confident stride with a backpack. I smiled as he walked into his cabin, opened his backpack to remove his laptop and get to his task for the day with the same enthusiasm as that of a child entering school. I wonder if anything has changed. We are all just children - working first to learn to be able to make a living, then to make that living. Somewhere we forget to do what we are trying to – live.