The truth of life

Lights out Alice!

So much of our life is spend living in an illusion. Of wealth. Of happiness. Of growth. Of career.

We rarely focus on the things that matter or the real things. People are withering. People are lonely. People are sad. They are crying. We ignore these on the pretense that it is just how life is and we are supposed to go on. But tell me, I am sitting here in a separate room, watching the people I care the most about in severe emotional pain and having nothing to look forward in their life. They are miserable and they are barely able to hide it. And I am supposed to just forget all this in front of me and pretend that everything is fine?

My board members are getting old. Retirement is not suiting one and not having any kids at home is affecting the other. Most days are boring, some are downright miserable. Kids don't have time or patience when they call and all they end up doing is talking superficially while trying to hide their pain and turmoil of a dreary everyday existence. One of them is usually the one that keeps their calm when there is no third person in the house which is no easy feat. To bottle all the criticism, mostly vitriol, born out of rage that the other person had no contribution in creating, day in and day out requires a lot of patience. But everyone breaks. People like this who bottle a lot, when they break, they break spectacularly. There is fireworks and everything in their way in that particular moment is fair game.

My job requires me to live far away from them. Their right upbringing has given me the opportunity to stand on my two legs and earn. They made me who I am and not they are the ones who have been left behind. I still hear sobs of wailing in the other room. This has nothing to do with the outburst that occurred less than half an hour ago. It is just a culmination of emotions, mostly circling around the fact that their kid will go away in a few days and it will be just them again, with nothing in their lives to pass the time. Retirement, I tell you, is the real disease here. Not having something specific to do everyday leads to the situation where people have too much time and nothing to direct their attention to. No grandkids, no kids to send to school or office, no office. Nothing to get them out of bed. Slowly and surely, routines start withering, motivation starts wavering. You take that one extra hour to get up from bed, initially telling yourself that you are doing it out of the freedom that lack of responsibility offers. Later you realize that you have just been lying to yourself. The reality is that you no longer have the drive, the motivation to do anything since the issues that used to press for your attention previously are no longer there and a habit that was built over the past two decades now no longer drives your life. You are lost, but more importantly, you are now old and unwilling to start from scratch all over again to develop new habits, patterns or friends.