A comment

Posted this on a blog today. Funny how a quick comment becomes so much and so true. The post is here:
http://andrea_kom.blogspot.com/2005/01/days-like-these.html
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Yea, yea. What is holding us back? I've considered this so many times and now I'm considering it again. Shakespeare said that the world is a stage and we're merely actors on it; so then, can't we play the role we choose? Why not get up and go? Why not step onto a highway, hitchhike across the continent, bum enough money for a ticket to Ghana or India or London and start a new life?

I almost left after high school. Almost left after freshman year at university. Now I'm finishing up my sophomore year and have put the plans to the back burner: I'm not leaving till after I graduate. Doesn't all this planning take all the spontanaiety out of it?

I think the reason we don't want to leave is simply that we're afraid of succeeding. What if we get to India and meet a friendly man who offers us a job, who offers us room and board, who offers us friendship? And what if we meet that someone and get married and assimilate so fully that we don't actually ever have to stop traveling: we can live in a new nation and never go back home. Well... never go back to the old home. I want to go, but I want to have to go back to Seattle. Why? Because if I do succeed, then I break all the constraints of society. If I end up happy without taking the path society has laid for me since birth, then society was wrong about my future. Society was wrong when it told me I had to be a rich, popular businessman in order to be happy. And if society was wrong about that, maybe its wrong about everything. If culture crumbles, then I have no paradigms with which to judge the world, and I've no foundation. I'm lost then. Scary.