From the perspective of plants, Lions are their protectors while herbivores are evil creatures.
That was me. Reading this quote one random day on the net, from a stranger.
I thought to myself, damn, life feels so obvious and trivial to us all humans because we live mostly a good life, every day, and yet for the animals in what is the real form of mother Nature, life is brutal.
Why don’t we appreciate life? Or rather, the good life that we have.
Have you ever felt overwhelmed? Your blood feels as if it is boiling, every breath is rough and ineffective, you feel like you’re done. You will die. You are a goner. Your life ends now, or maybe later, but there’s no point anymore because why bother? Your fate is already written. Maybe you have a disease that’s slowly but quickly enough eating you from the inside. Maybe you did something you shouldn’t have done and now society is going to claim your head.
But you are still alive.
You glaze outside the window. The sun is up in the blue sky. There’s a light breeze that goes over your skin. It usually feels good. It should feel good.
However, may the the hedonistic adaptation be damned and blessed, it is “just” what normal life feels like. It doesn’t feel special. It is not enough for you to make you live in the moment. To really feel it.
At this point, you aren’t even sad, you don’t even want to cry. You were scared before, but it starts to fade away. Apathy. You feel the void.
A void so overwhelming that it feels unpalatable. And there is nothing to do about it. Maybe it’s the curse of being “the superior species”. Nothing is perfect, they say. What made you think that human beings are the sole exception?
As you build an empire around you, as you travel long miles to achieve what you once thought was your goal, you realize that money does not buy you everything. Whether that’s a “luckily” or “sadly” is left to the reader to ponder about.
You once were happy as a child for your parents shielded you from the bad. Or maybe you shielded yourself from the blatant brutality of the world and thinking there were good actors trying to protect you is part of the act. It doesn’t matter anyway, because the past cannot be walked a second time.
Happiness. I longed for it wildly. I was probably wrong. Are you free? Nobody is free. I thought everyone needs to have a dream. A dream so high that if you try to chase it you shoot for another galaxy and will end up on the stars. Makes sense, right? Nobody is truly free in this manifestation of the existence. I chased it for real, and it probably landed my higher than I’d ever expect. I’m still not happy, though.
That’s not to say I’m sad. Quite the contrary, at most, I could say I feel the void. An overwhelming void. Sometimes I wake up and I’m just tired, but I still keep going. Where, I do not know, but surely it is forward.
Okay, I lied. Sometimes I go backward. You got me, I lied again earlier. I was happy when I was a kid. I wish I could go back to those emotions and the freedom I felt. Don’t get me wrong! I know full well that I likely wouldn’t be “pleased” with the things I was doing as a kid. Life changes, and so do I. But the emotions, the feeling of freedom. That’s what I long for.
Even those folks who live a simple life and are content are not truly free. Yet they live a good life. That’s probably the first time I truly felt envy toward someone else.
And, in the end, you realize that the void, which feels so unpalatable, so unbearable, doesn’t make any sense. Because, after all, what might even matter a few lively years among millions of years of evolution and frens?