Life's A Bitch

Life's a bitch. Or an elephant. Or an ostrich. A rhino? A phoenix? A dragon? Dinosaur? Unicorn???

Life can be anything you want it to be. You just need to know how to ride it.

And you do need to know how to ride it, because there's no way to get rid of it and waking up and feeling like shit is definitely not the way to live.

That's why I prefer a weekend-break over a vacation-break anytime.

Life sucks by nature in absolute. The trick is to turn the absolute into relative - the all-familiar half-empty-half-full mentality. There is enough said about that.

With a shift in our angle and perspective, it's not that difficult to attain the half-full outlook. But look at the glass long enough, half-full will slowly become less-half-full, and then less-half-full will slowly become lesser-half-full. Heck, how can it not? Evaporation is the cause. But I digress.

The more difficult trick is in the maintenance - of the optimal mentality, not of the water level.

Humans are greedy and lazy by nature, for good and for bad. Greed and laziness got us light bulbs, trains, aeroplanes, automobiles, mobile phones, and other conveniences. But greed and laziness also got us dissatisfaction, complaints, angers, violence, etc. The difference? Greed and laziness as a starting point against greed and laziness as an end.

Greed and laziness are evils by their own. We need ingenuity, creativity and the willingness to satisfy the greed and laziness to turn the negatives into positives. Can you imagine a world without light bulbs? Sure, we might have a greener earth today, but without the trains, the aeroplanes, the automobiles, the mobile phones? That's probably one unthinkable state we would rather not be in. And who would ... oops, sidetracked again. But humans are inherently easily distracted too.

Let the status quo of optimism lasts a tad too long, and our greed and laziness will penetrate our feeble wall of concentration and start to wreak havoc in our mind. True to its physical attributes, a half-empty glass will only remain as half-full for so long.

Therefore, unless you are a pure optimist by birth, optimism needs practices, foresight and hard works too.

The only constant is change. A colorful life is a life with ups and downs, ins and outs, back and forth, yin and yang - in essence, contrasts. A life with no contrast is called - a death. A seasoned optimist will know how to adjust his heart according to his changing environment to achieve a perfect balance. A more complete optimist will know how to anticipate the forthcoming changes and sustain a perfect balance. A master optimist will maintain a perfect balance indefinitely regardless of the environment. But then again, a master optimist would probably belong to a mental institution.

For us mere mortals, we can only scream and shout as life takes us on a roller-coastal ride. After having gone through the cycle frequent enough, we'll start to get the hang of it. Change our angle and perspective slightly according to the twists and turns and we'll start to groove with the cycle. We would probably still scream and shout, but in joys. As the ride gets smoother, life gets sweeter. But we can't get lazy. Slack it out too long, it'll come back and bite us.

That's why a weekend-break would be just nice. Long enough to refresh, and short enough to prevent straying from the groove.

That's also why I dislike vacation. Sure, a vacation will be fun. It'll be enjoyable. I can have the times of my life. But it's also long enough to leave my groove in life bent and crooked when it ends. It's always tough to get into the groove of life again after a vacation, especially an enjoyable vacation. Life always feels like shit at the stage where vacation ends, and life resumes. You'll have to retake another strenuous session of questions and answers to adjust your perspective of life to get back into the groove.

As of today, four weeks after my last vacation, I'm still trudging through my questions and answers session somewhere along the half way mark. And it looks like before I finish the session, life will stay bitchy too.


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