Everything's Eventual

It's been close to a month since my last post. I can't claim to have been unusually busy, although, as one classmate very aptly put it, the latter part of this semester has given a new dimension to the phrase 'Hell Week'. Because, as I mentioned earlier, I had been expecting several Hell Weeks to pass as successive waves of departmental exams for most subjects, but the phrase Hell Week implies periods in between when things are not as Hellish. Unfortunately, we didn't have them. So our Hell Weeks dragged on and on and are more accurately termed collectively as one big happy Hell Month. I won't go into detail and complain about how our insignificant, unimportant subjects reared their evil heads and made their presence felt with unreasonable requirements totally out of proportion with their designated GPA values. I can do that later.

My point is that all the added stress isn't really the reason why I haven't been blogging. You see, when you have a lot to do you're supposed to get busy and go to work. But since I have an inherent aversion to work, I didn't do that, and I ended up doing nothing. And every time I thought about blogging I would get myself in front of a PC and start typing but I couldn't make the words come out. And sometimes I'd be too lazy to even get myself in front of a PC and the thoughts I'd been keeping in my head stayed for a while but they probably got tired of being there so they left.

A lot of things have happened. I have made decisions and I have yet to reap the consequences. I don't want to review stale news, but there are a few things which I think are worth mentioning:

Last weekend I read two books. The Stranger by Albert Camus and We The Living by Ayn Rand. Both got me thinking. Because disregarding the fact that the stories are entirely different, and that one is pessemistic and the other ends with a kind of optimism, I realized that the two are essentially the same. They both talk about what it means to be alive. And they are both honest. And from entirely different perspectives they send the message that we are responsible for how our lives turn out and we need to choose to live and value our existence.

There is a song called 100 Years by Five for Fighting. The melody is beautiful. It's one of the songs I gradually learned to like. It's a story of someone's life that passes by as if years were just precious moments contained in a verse. There's a line in it, when that someone is about to die, that says, '...[there's still] time to buy and time to choose...'. And its true. Because until our last moments we keep on choosing what we make of ourselves. And when we do nothing, it's still a choice.

A few hours ago I decided to watch a movie. I did it because I needed to study for an exam in Zoology tomorrow and for another exam in Chemistry the day after that (both of which I'll fail if I take them right now), and because I felt like I would throw up if I did. So I watched The Butterfly Effect. And I was stunned. Afterwards, I couldn't stop thinking. I have always been haunted by all the 'what ifs' in life. What if I wasn't born a Christian? What if I lived somewhere else and met different people? What if I could have lived a completely different life that would give me everything I could ask for, but instead I am living this, and there's no way out because this is the one life that I have, and so I'm forever be denied of that better possibility and since I don't see it, to me it wouldn't be anything at all? These are things I've been asking myself ever since I can remember. And these are the questions the movie addresses. The movie made me realize that what we do to ourselves is so powerful and has so many repercussions, and that our choices can literally turn us into completely different people. It made me see that I am not bound to my concept of myself, that I reinforce my view of who I am and how others see me in every moment through my every action. And by simply not taking things for granted, I can change the entire course of my life, and the lives of others around me.

I remember, some time ago, that I read Stephen King's compilation of short stories, Everything's Eventual. I don't particularly remember the title story, but I remember thinking that I wouldn't want for the statement to be true. Because I can't accept that I don't have a say in how things turn out for me, because I think that when I change my whole future changes, because I think that life would be so boring when we can't decide for ourselves.