The Difference Between You and Me

Chapter 7

The wind blew steadily against her face and playfully tossed around her hair as Ammie stared out at the ocean. She watched as the waves went up and down ridding the ocean of all her impurities making it a beautiful and safe environment for the aquatic life below to live comfortably. Ammie had always loved the ocean and marine life. She admired how vast, deep and mysterious the ocean was and thought about the undiscovered wonders and mysteries that this body of deep blue water held.

She thought about life under the ocean, how free and happy the creatures all are. They don't have to worry about, the dangers, hypocrisy and corruption of this earth. Not people's opinions of them or how other people's life affected them.

Unexpectedly, way out towards the horizon, an Orca leaped out of the water and dived back in. Ammie smiled to herself, the Orca was her favorite animal, she thought of it as her spirit animal. It was just like her and she just like it, the fact that they both looked so cute and adorable outside but are actually vicious monsters on the inside.

As she took in the surroundings, the beach, she noticed for the first time, is very beautiful. When no one was around that is. It was a generally crowded and noisy place to be but today she was the only one there and that for her was the best thing. Ammie liked her own company, atmosphere, peace and quiet. She hated so many things, but nothing was worse than unwanted noise and chaos.

As she stared out at the ocean and bathed in the sun, she boarded her train of thoughts and prepared for the spirals, twist and turns it will take as more thoughts unraveled. She began thinking about the world and people. About how sad it was that we don't realize we are all the same, despite our unique personalities. Even more saddening that as human beings, we rarely live out our dreams. We let society define us, limit us and our potentials, failing to realize that our only limit is ourselves.

The power of our minds is so confined within the walls of societal views, values and norms forcing us to uphold a contract that constantly works against us, that we get nothing from. But only few dares to challenge this "social contract" because only a few is willing to be a deviant, an outcast and ostracized for what they believe in. And the majority continue to be oppressed, back-benched and silenced.

We are often discouraged from pursuing our dreams and lead to trot the well trotted path of mediocrity. Encouraged instead to be ordinary people in what we assume to be an ordinary world. But at what cost? To die with nothing to fill the dash that separates the two years on our tombstones? What then will we have to show as evidence of what we did with our limited time?

We fail, as we have failed many other things, to see that without others who came before us having taken the step to being extraordinary that we wouldn't have as much as what we have today benefitting from and deeming as a necessity. If they had taken up membership in the discouragement club, giving in to the hundreds of failures, what would we be without today? It is saddening.

Pablo Picasso once wrote, 'today's world doesn't make any sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?' You see the world is not only filled with balance, but the world is balance and balance is the world, just as life is time and time is life. It's a place of birth and death, joy and sorrow, happiness and sadness, hatred and love, tears and smiles, war and peace, cheating and romance, a place filled with kind and mean people, of guns and roses, of scars and kisses, hugs and wounds, hurt and laughter, confusion and comprehension, where the past meets the present and collides with the future, a place where we stand and where we fall, where we have a choice and where we are forced, a place of aggression and passivity, of bravery and cowardice, of colours and dullness, excitement and boredom, beauty and ugliness, noise and silence, adventure and confinement, a place of hope and disappointment, joy and misery, celebration and mourning, whole hearts and broken hearts, birthdays and funerals, lies and truthfulness, life and corpse, a place to live and a place to die.

It's saddening that as humans, who are supposedly emotional beings, we no longer think deeply about anything. We take things as they appear without questioning their purpose or existence. Someone once said, 'the saddest people in life are the persons who don't think deeply about anything' and a quote couldn't be truer. We are no longer a curious race, our priority is to misrepresent the truth and show it off to the world for validation and acceptance.

Life, we fail to understand, is not about pleasing others; it is about pleasing ourselves. But a life is not important except in the impact it has on others. Life's most persistent and urgent questions are, what are you doing for others? What is your impact on other people's lives? What mark will you leave on this earth? What will you be remembered for when you die? The money you made or the life you lived? Will you have just been a passing phase in the life of everyone who knew you or a legend, spoken about for generations to come? Did you sought after, found and dominated your purpose? And if we cannot answer these questions, it means we aren't living at all but merely surviving and doing enough to make it to the next day and my, isn't that saddening.

We all need to strive to making the life in our years count and look up on life as an adventure that only ends when we take our last breath signaling the end in totality. We all have a duty to be happy, to be true to ourselves and enjoy life despite what we don't have. Because by being real and raw with ourselves, living well and seizing every moment as it comes will allow us to inevitably impact greatly on other people's lives for the better.

The people we meet every day should be cherished. Whether they lasted for five minutes or fifty years, they have, believe it or not, taught you something you never knew that you never knew. Life's not hard despite the many complaints, a lot of us just haven't gotten sick and tired of being sick and tired and ultimately doing something about it as oppose to wallowing in self-pity.

It really just takes us to realize that we are our own enemies. Not our friends with their 'filter perfect' world or strangers who want to suffocate and piss on our fire. It is the lone fact that we have only ourselves to best and prove something to because we are all self-motivated, but only successful people are willing to admit that. And once that realization dawns on us, everything else will be lined up for us to take our lives into our own hands and act so as to make them fall into place. As without action life is like a fantasy fiction.

'Life', they say, 'is really simple. We just insist on making it complicated'.