Mirages

I have discovered that the thing that is screwing up our happiness is mirages. You know, like that thing which appears like water from a distance, and, when you get close, you discover that it is the same damn sand that you had been trudging on all along.

In life though, this trick is played across time more often than across distance. I find that, when I am planning to do something the next day, it appears so exciting that I am all keyed up to get cracking on it. When the next day dawns, though, the same damn thing appears so tedious, so boring that I get keyed down (if I may coin a phrase) in a nanosecond. And people think I am procrastinating, when I have only been deceived by a mirage! Yet, somehow, the same thing appears as exciting when I think of doing it the next day. Life really plays scurvy tricks on you.

It is always like this, though, and I think for everyone. When I was a kid, I could not wait to get to college which seemed like a real cool place to be in. When I got to college, it seemed to be such fun to be earning your own money with the freedom to do with it as you please. I sort of cut short the next couple of steps - you know, that nice feeling of belonging and stability that seemed to come only with marriage (along with other things) and, then, that lovely feeling of being a parent with kids who looked up to you (the most deceptive mirage of all. Kids? Looking up to parents?). Then, you looked forward to the peaceful feeling of retiring from the rat race. Once you did that, what do you do? The mirage thingy does not seem to work as attractively with the total peace of the grave, so you look back and yearn for the innocent days of childhood. Life, I tell you! The bloody thing always shows such wonderful images...but only when you are distanced by time from it.

It is not just this. You look ahead and think how happy you will be once you get a two-wheeler. Then you get the two-wheeler and find that what you actually need for happiness is a car. You get the car and find that what you need really is a bigger car. Then...by now, you know how it goes.

If you are really unlucky, you can suffer a bigger shock. Like you work your butt off to become a surgeon, always dreaming of the joy of becoming one, and discover that this was not what you wanted at all and you really would have preferred to become a rocket scientist. Or, you dream of becoming an author, with fans stampeding to buy your books and mobbing you for autographs only to find that you have a tough time proving that you even wrote a book and have to go around begging door-to-door to get people to read it. Mirages, I tell you!

There is one mirage, though, that never let me down. Or, rather, it is not a mirage when you see water from a distance and it really proves to be water, is it?

I always thought I would love to be able to laze around all day and, boy, I do!