What are the burdens of
a live not lived, or more accurately a life not lived well? “Sometimes I can
feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
Jonathan Safran Foer wrote this
in ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’. I believe many of us ‘live lives of
quiet desperation’ a quote from another famous book by our friend Thoreau. We
live lives we never wanted to live. We work at jobs not of our choice entirely.
They are drudgery, they are not our ‘calling’ or our ‘destinies’ although many
employers expect to believe they are. On top of that we get those people that
cheerfully chirp ‘Do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
This may be true but few of us have that luxury. There are bills to be paid,
responsibilities to meet. Doing something you love is not often an option. Over
time, the burdens can become heavier unless one learns to let go of them as a
child would let go of a balloon, and watch it drift across the sky. But too
often, that balloon is instead our dreams, our hopes, and our futures as we
watch it slowly drift away, out of reach of our outstretched hands.
