Post by Ganbare! on Mar 31, 2010 8:18:50 GMT -5
Length edited. Thanks for having the patience to read the whole wall of text.
I recently have attended my school reunion, it was great to hear of the whereabouts of former classmates. At the same moment, I moved to New York for my internship, met quite a number of new people, being the twenty somethings we are the childhood conversation is never very far. Based on our respective social backgrounds, where we grew up or ethnicity our lives had little in common. My snowball fights were someone else's swimming at the seaside, my lonely urban childhood watching cartoons on TV was to someone else's playing soccer with a bunch of children in a Venezuelan village. My multiracial/lingual environment was someone else's rural WASP town in Arkansas.
I don't think one life is ever fully satisfying, so many missed opportunities, people I will never meet, places I'll never visit, cultures I'll never really be a part of, diverse activities I won't have the knowledge or time to ever experiment.
Career changes have become the norm, an estimated 5 majors changes occur in a worker's life, people one day leaving everything behind them to live a completly new life elsewhere, evolution in faith or sexual orientation are all major societal trends as well. In a complex post-industrial society characterized by an overload of information, too many options to choose from, people make far from optimal choices thus increasingly putting things into perspective, they think 'Should I have pursued my dream of becoming a doctor? Should I have given this charming man I met a night on the plane a chance? Why wasn't I born in X country? In mankind's History our specie has never been as professionally and geographically mobile as they are now. People want to breathe, to live other cultures, other lifestyles. A large part of the EAN community fits the bill, we are to some extent the epitome of change and diversity in one existence.
Thinking about my life so far I can roughly split it in two equivalent parts, one in Canada, the other in France, the culture, how things work and my immediate surroundings (downtown to suburbia) differed in so many ways, it's almost as if I had lived 2 lives.
Therefore I sometimes wonder how amazing it'd be if I could live 100 lives, in as many cultures, lifestyles, flavors. One time I would be an aspiring violinist in Berlin, in another it would be a Buddhist monk on my journey West, in another I'd be a Jamaican athlete training for the Olympics for example. The goal would be to have subjective insight by living these experiences as opposed to have a simple distant/theoric outlook on these. I can imagine what my friend's lives are by listening to their stories or seeing their photos but ultimately it"s not organic.
The way I conveyed my thought is not really organized but this is just an intuition I'll develop later on. Do you think one life is satisfying or is it just too short? Ever had such a reincarnation fantasy?
I recently have attended my school reunion, it was great to hear of the whereabouts of former classmates. At the same moment, I moved to New York for my internship, met quite a number of new people, being the twenty somethings we are the childhood conversation is never very far. Based on our respective social backgrounds, where we grew up or ethnicity our lives had little in common. My snowball fights were someone else's swimming at the seaside, my lonely urban childhood watching cartoons on TV was to someone else's playing soccer with a bunch of children in a Venezuelan village. My multiracial/lingual environment was someone else's rural WASP town in Arkansas.
I don't think one life is ever fully satisfying, so many missed opportunities, people I will never meet, places I'll never visit, cultures I'll never really be a part of, diverse activities I won't have the knowledge or time to ever experiment.
Career changes have become the norm, an estimated 5 majors changes occur in a worker's life, people one day leaving everything behind them to live a completly new life elsewhere, evolution in faith or sexual orientation are all major societal trends as well. In a complex post-industrial society characterized by an overload of information, too many options to choose from, people make far from optimal choices thus increasingly putting things into perspective, they think 'Should I have pursued my dream of becoming a doctor? Should I have given this charming man I met a night on the plane a chance? Why wasn't I born in X country? In mankind's History our specie has never been as professionally and geographically mobile as they are now. People want to breathe, to live other cultures, other lifestyles. A large part of the EAN community fits the bill, we are to some extent the epitome of change and diversity in one existence.
Thinking about my life so far I can roughly split it in two equivalent parts, one in Canada, the other in France, the culture, how things work and my immediate surroundings (downtown to suburbia) differed in so many ways, it's almost as if I had lived 2 lives.
Therefore I sometimes wonder how amazing it'd be if I could live 100 lives, in as many cultures, lifestyles, flavors. One time I would be an aspiring violinist in Berlin, in another it would be a Buddhist monk on my journey West, in another I'd be a Jamaican athlete training for the Olympics for example. The goal would be to have subjective insight by living these experiences as opposed to have a simple distant/theoric outlook on these. I can imagine what my friend's lives are by listening to their stories or seeing their photos but ultimately it"s not organic.
The way I conveyed my thought is not really organized but this is just an intuition I'll develop later on. Do you think one life is satisfying or is it just too short? Ever had such a reincarnation fantasy?
