On Experience

Let's begin by making plain the obvious: we only have a short time to live on this earth.

Every single one of us - me, Tom, Dick, and Harry; even you, you, the very reader of this blog - is going to die. There will come a day when we cease to exist in the knowledge of all those living - beyond that, who knows what happens? Perhaps we lose all recollection and become reborn, perhaps we simply enter oblivion, and cease to exist period. This, although interesting and frightening, is unimportant. The essential piece of knowledge is that we happen to have embodied a vessel that can express and experience many a fantastic emotion - we luckily became an animal that rules the world, that has a cognitive ability that far surpasses that of all other creatures here on earth.

No, I'm not going to tell you we should be grateful, I'm not about to preach, all I'm going to say is that we're lucky. We have this vast ability and this precious opportunity to experience the most interesting things, emotionally, physically, and what I propose with this blog post is that we take it.

Previous blog posts have exposed my naturally neurotic self - I'm not going to deny that, but now I think, perhaps, it isn't such an awful thing for others to misunderstand us. In fact, now I might suggest it is a vital experience for others to misunderstand us. One who first misunderstands is most likely to better understand later, for they have had the experience.

We've got a limited time in this world, and there is too much to experience - more than we ever will be able to - but we must experience as much of it as possible to fulfil our lives. We must engage in conversation with that girl who catches our attention - sure, we might horribly embarrass ourselves or might become devastated at the realisation that she won't ever love us, but it is another experience, one of the many that we must hungrily devour (for it will help us become stronger and our time is short); we must travel and experience new sensations, new cultures, many other interesting people that inhabit the world with us; we must tackle the mundane, partake in a job uninteresting to us, so that we absorb that experience also; but we must also chase our dreams as though our lives depend on it, because although there are many things to experience - all, I'd argue, as important as the other - what enjoyment can we take from life if we haven't experienced the one we most desired, our utmost goal?

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that: there is no bad, there is no embarrassing, there is no awkward, there is no objectively good, either - there are just a multitude of experiences, each as important as the other, each which we should perceive in a different manner from our fixed mental state of "good" and "bad".

What am I actually saying, you ask? Well, do something tomorrow that you always wanted to do but have perhaps put off when considering the consequences as bad. Instead, perceive the consequence as an important experience - be it your desired outcome or not - and just move on. We honestly don't have time to sit and worry and avoid doing due to fear.

Quit your job! Ask out that girl! Gather your money and move away! Approach that guy you think you might get on well with! Just do!

Experience! It's all we have.

And then we die.