Mandatory Meandering

Moving, shifting, ever changing through this journey of life, acquiring scar tissue and bruises and happiness and sadness, all sides of the dodecahedron looking shape we call life, twelve faces for each month of each year that we exist.

What motivates us? What pushes us out of our comfort zones and into places we feared to ever enter? What cradles us in moments of mental agony, when we feel that continuing to breathe cannot be possible? Why is it that most of us push on to an eventual demise, sometimes forgetting that it exists, that life will cease to be at any given time? Ernest Hemingway, my literary lover, said that "it is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end". We all are journeying to our ends, but are we taking the journey itself for granted?

It is difficult during moments of any sort of pain to see any light. The window to one's soul during these moments have their blinds shut tight, so tight that not even the tiniest of sun rays can enter to brighten up their days. In this instance one can fail to see the beauty in the world, one fails to remember their part in the world and the reason for the continuation of their journey. One eventually pulls through, but most of the time one does not. One might then get caught in a vicious cycle of self-hatred, of self-mutilation both in the physical and mental sense, and they may fall short of ever being able to reach the blind's drawstrings.

But we are mandatory. Each one of us. We each teach one another though most of us loathe the idea of school and teachers. We each teach each others lessons though most of us set bad examples. Jeffrey Dahmer taught me not to drug men and bring them back home to my apartment and eat them. Alan Grant taught me never to tour a park populated by live dinosaurs. Carl Denham taught me never to set sail towards Skull Island and on the off chance that I do, to never capture King Kong and bring him back to my hometown. Pinocchio taught me never to want to become a politician in the event of having an extended nose with larger nostrils during the flu season. Every day I am taught something on Tumblr, whether it is to love my body, to hate those who exploit and abuse animals, and to feed bees that appear to be dying sweet water to rejuvenate them. Tumblr also teaches me not to use it around others in the event that a pornographic gif pops up and dances on my phone screen beyond my control, but that is beside the point.

The point is that just like atoms, just like the molecules that make us up, we make up one another. We are crucial to the existence of others, which is why most of us require relationships to thrive, not romantic relationships necessarily. But everyone has someone, even that homeless man down the road who feeds pigeons his scraps even though he needs them to survive himself. The ocean will never feel fulfilled unless it touches daily the sand and fondles its many shells and bathes with its human visitors. The air cannot itself breathe unless it blows through the trees and tickles its many leaves, and it laughs with them and blows off through the branches of many other trees.

We are all interconnected, and though  people discriminate against the internet for taking away our lives, we should rejoice it for allowing us to meander mandatorily in a free manner, and to a larger audience.