Meditative Prose
Wednesday, 28 November 2007
After living as a working man for the past year and a half, I know a few things for certain. First is that I only want to work full-time for as long as I absolutely have to. That might be a while, as I learned too late that college was mostly providing me with a lot of debt that I would have to work off. Right now I’m counting down my student loan debt from $20,000, which is more than I make in a year before taxes. The corporate slave state owns me for a year. That is the price of hindsight.
The second thing I know is that it’s really easy to turn off your brain and just be a cog in the machine. When I get home from work, like everyone else, I’m exhausted. The last thing I want to do is spend an hour and a half of unpaid time cooking a healthy meal and cleaning up. So why not pay someone else to make a pizza for me? My mind is fried, so instead of reading or painting or practicing my guitar, why not just spend a few hours clicking aimlessly around the internet or watching a movie? The backbone of our economic system is people like you and me, who have the best part of our days taken from us for low wages, spending our little money to remain comfortably numb. The only way to counteract this is to consent to feel, which is a difficult thing to do in this world. You’ve got to feel the frustration of work to know what it does to you. You’ve got to feel the joy of making music or having a good conversation to remember you’re more than just a cog.
The third thing I’ve learned is that I have to write to stay awake. A teacher of mine used to say “There is a tremendous correlation between writing and remembering,” and now I understand what he means. It’s not enough to struggle through each day if you just forget the struggle tomorrow. Record your days, every defeat and especially every victory. These are your cave paintings, that remind you that yesterday was sacred & today & tomorrow too. Paint them every day and you will remember.
