Have you ever thought about the way in which you live your life? How you see other people live their lives and think…is this real? Or is it something we are somehow coerced into.
I go for a walk every day to exercise my heart and the rest of my body. I often walk around the village where I currently live, taking different routes from day to day. It’s a typical village, based around farms and farming for hundreds of years with some idyllic and lovely historic properties from the classic inn, the church, the manor house and the cottages. Like a fair few villages, some of the farmland was sold off in the 1980s and a large housing estate was built along with amenities such as shops and an expansion of the school and medical facilities. And since then, sporadically, there have been additional (albeit much smaller) estates built so it’s a rather large village today. The thing with the estates, though, is how very formulaic they are. And how they haven’t fostered a very significant sense of community.
What struck me the other day as I was walking round was the sense that as people, we are kind of like drones. The houses are nice enough, if rather formulaic as I say, and sat outside are the cars on the drives which are framed by usually well looked after front gardens. They mostly all look the same, though. And I wondered why we aspire to this. We are told when we are young that we have to go to school, learn a pre-ordained curriculum that is somehow supposed to provide us with all the information we need to create some kind of a start in life so we can go on either to more education or employment opportunities that apparently provide us with a specialism for the rest of our lives. We are told all this education will provide us with everything we need to ‘get a good job’ so we can pay our way. We are told that we should find someone to settle down with, have children with, raise said children with and purchase these formulaic houses. We are told, basically, to live life with our eyes closed. To live a life that is unquestioned in so many fundamental ways. To live unconsciously rather than consciously.
It struck me that this isn’t a life of growth, whether spiritual or material. That this isn’t a life of being who you truly are, it’s a life of doing as you are told to a large extent. To not question the education you are provided with. To not acknowledge your soul exists let alone follow its calling. I felt claustrophobic as I walked around, as though I couldn’t breathe because of the constraints such a life represented.
Now, I know that some people are incredibly happy with such a life, that for them it’s a pinnacle. It is everything they wanted and they are tremendously happy with the choices they have made. And that’s wonderful. For me, though, I couldn’t help but think…isn’t there more to life? More to life than following what everyone else is doing, for some people more to life than keeping up with the Jones’s which I have been very guilty of myself in the past. It didn’t get me anywhere, just brought a world of pain to me in the end.
The fact that I am questioning this is, I think more symptomatic of the journey I have been on, and says a lot about how my thought processes have changed and evolved after the last two years or so. That I see something I once bought into as constraining now, as stifling who I am and the growth I am looking for.
I just can’t help but wonder, though. What if I am not the only one who starts to think this way. What if a lot of those people in those houses wake up and start to feel the same as me one morning. What would happen then? What if those people rejected everything they had been told? Didn’t send their children to school, didn’t go to their jobs but decided to follow a path of growth for them. I wonder what the reaction would be…
Louisa Simpson 