This is a post responding to Alis’ thought-provoking post from last week, in which she challenged people who are “asleep” in their own lives, living mechanically, like Neo from the Matrix before taking the red pill. She said people who live consciously, breaking away from the nice warm beds of mundane lives, those are awake.
That post left me with a bitter taste.
Not only because I’ve been asking myself the same question – “What am I doing with my life? Why am I here? Is this enough?” – but because, along the way, I realized the question in itself can only give a bitter answer. I sometimes have the feeling that only entrepreneurs write this post best, and mostly refer to corporate people as the ones caught “in the Matrix”, the ones who are asleep.
But, is it enough to be conscious of your role, to have a meaning, to realize it is bigger than the cage, and to break free?
No, my dear, even those who make the choice to break free – the bold ones who dare to adventure out in the void, they are not awake.
Because, I believe there’s more to that.
I believe to be “awake” has nothing to do with what you do for a living. You can be awake even if your days are the same, one after the other. You can be awake in the most boring of routines. After all, that’s what monks in their caves do.
To be awake is to realize there is no “purpose” - and that we are foolish to imagine that, if for a day, or a month, or a year, we feel we are on a straight path where everything converges, this is it, we’ve uncovered LIFE.
We may ride the wave one day, and get crushed the next.
Being awake, to me, is being conscious, being in touch with myself. Connecting to the people around, paying attention to what I learn. It’s changing, looking at the waves as they come and learning to swim, instead of surfing (although the latter may seem cooler to everyone around).
To quote the Matrix again, I sometimes have the feeling that people who believe they are “awake” and the rest are asleep, feel they can bend the spoon.
However, “there is no spoon”.
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