Travel diary pt 06: Should I grow up?
“You should grow up and take responsibility of your actions.” was a comment I got relating to the previous thoughts. Yes, definitely! That’s a great piece of advice for the whole humanity. Let’s grow up and make sure that all 7 billion of us can start life on equal standing, while taking care of the environment so that the future generations have a habitat as well. Krishnamurti once said: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Funnily enough just after this I somehow ended up on a truckers’ website that had this posting:
“We live in a world of pin numbers, passwords, excessive fees, anti-depressants and Cialis, iPhones and Droids, divorce, unfairness, discrimination, incivility, excessive complacency, international uncertainty and bureaucratic stupidity. Today on Oprah, her guest was a high school quarterback that decided to become a transsexual and then a lesbian. Last night on the Discovery Channel a three year old girl with no face was profiled. That is what we’re watching on television. We exist as part of a global piss contest between little boys with big toys consistently trying to control how we all live and what freedoms we have. We don’t see people, we don’t shake their hands or look in their eyes. We text, E-mail, tweet and Facebook trite little messages about what everyone else is doing, but nobody really communicates.”
Being on the road you get to surprising communication situations. Last weekend two people in two separate instances approached me with the same thought: Don’t you think all these people around us live in a different reality than you and me? These questioners – one from Pakistan and one from South Africa – looked at life differently from the rest of us. They looked around seeing the absurd nature of the way humanity functions at the moment. What if people are not supposed to grow up? What if we’ve lost the connection with who we really are and we are born? What if we should in fact grow down and regain our curiosity, imagination and true connection with other people and the nature?
The trucker piece of advice continued: “Believe me it’s a hell of lot easier to stay on the track you’re on now rather than switch. Switching takes effort and self control, both of which are a pain in the rear.” I’ll keep this in mind and see if I can grow up and become “normal” one day.
This is part six of Tomi Astikainen’s travel diary on his journey to the European Hitchhikers’ Meeting in Portugal on 6 August 2010… and on a journey to himself. Current location: Helsinki. Current mood: Positively perplexed.
