Whose Life is it Anyway?
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly
enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia
and the irksomeness of action.
Learned Hand (1872 to 1961)
Saturday nights conflict; decisions, decisions! To watch Fear Factor, that illuminating insight into what makes people tick under pressure, or to watch Whose line is it anyway, that empowering statement of mans (read (wo)mans) ability to pluck inspiration out of the air and entertain huge audiences without inhibition. (What all this says about my social life is a horse from another safari altogether!) Thank goodness for the VCR!
Whose line is it anyway? Drew Carey and his group of splendid nuts, spontaneously and hilariously creating solutions to situations designed to be impossibly challenging. Creatively inventing actions, lines and lyrics without fear of ridicule or even entertaining the possibility of failure. I cant, I dont know, Im stuck are not beliefs entertained or indeed verbalized by these creative troupers as week after week they allow their imaginations free rein to play at lifes absurdities.
Why is this absurdly stupid show an inspiration for me? Because it is a statement of what our lives aught to be about fun, spontaneity, laughter, joy, creativity, inspiration and the fulfilment that springs from exercising unlimited choices.
Most of us left a schooling system that was designed to make us pass an examination that was obsolete before we started, but hardly relevant to prepare us for life. We bought into the myth get a good education, get a good job, work hard for forty or fifty years and retire with a good pension and live out the remaining years of our lives in comfort and happiness doing all the things that we sacrificed earlier because we were too busy struggling through the formula.
So we wake up at thirty or forty or fifty and find ourselves hating our lives. Hate the boss, hate the work, hate the company, hate the house, the car, the debts, the restrictions, the rut, the trap. We embark on last ditch, rebellious, acts of mid-life crisis in a vain attempt to regain our lost freedom of choice and recapture our lost youth.
Sure, we still have the choices. But the consequences are too huge and the implications too scary. We feel stuck. Trapped in a rut with walls just high enough to peer enviously over but too high to climb easily. So we give up?
Neil Donald Walsch in his book Recreating yourself, a spin off from his Conversations with God Trilogy, has this to say: There is no expectation, God has no expectation of you. All you get to do is decide who you want to be and design your life to support your choice.
The problem is, many of has have chosen by default, abdicating our birthright to follow society's chosen rut. The choices of our new found freedom my own place, my own car, my own job, my own salary, my own life echoing triumphantly in our ears, blinding us to the walls of our self imposed rut until we are seemingly irrecoverably too far down the track.
The good news, as those zany guys demonstrate weekly, is that we still have choices. We still have time. We still have our spontaneity, our creativity, our freedom and ability to choose.
Do YOU dare?
