Date Archives August 5, 2010

life is an adventure on paper, but is it in reality?

brittany go ape

All life is technically an adventure, a bold, usually risky, undertaking with uncertain outcomes.

However, because most of us live in expectation that everything should turn out just as we want it to, life becomes oddly a function of habit where we live in the immediate future or past, but rarely ever the present.

I notice it in myself. I drive the same route to work in the morning, my expectation being that today’s drive should more or less resemble yesterday’s drive. When something happens that upsets that expectation, an accident, a slow tractor hogging the rode, the immediate reaction is to get annoyed or angry. I take the same train, sit in the same carriage, generally sit in the same seat if no one has beaten me to it. I walk the same route to the office, stop at the same coffee shop, order the same drink (in fact, I do this so habitually that the staff don’t even asked what I want to drink anymore, they automatically start preparing my medium black coffee to go).

Here is were the past creeps in. Because it happened that way yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that, we automatically presumes the same thing will happen again today. But in reality the outcome is uncertain. However, we presume it to be certain and get upset when it doesn’t turn out just as we want it.

In an adventure, the uncertainty of the outcome is what makes it exciting.

Imagine what life would be like if we embraced the uncertainty of life from moment to moment.

I wonder if we slip into presumptions and habits of routine because we cannot take too much excitement? Or do we need to feel certain, even if it is a false certainty just so we can function? Or is it that we can’t break the cycle of our mind either being in the future or the past from one moment to the next?

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