This Life

I was trying to explain this idea to a friend yesterday and getting nowhere with it. I went out for a walk in my town. I took a haphazard route, going through neighborhoods that were ... well I used the Monopoly board as an analogy ... walked through what I described as some Baltic Avenue and Mediterranean type streets, then took a turn towards town and back out on another boulevard that was pure Park Place and Boardwalk.

And on my walk I was thinking how it is some people end up on one street with the big house and some other people end up on the not so nice alley with the little shack and what the assumptions were when we were all growing up. Many friends of mine who expected to be doing very well now, are facing their 40's and 50's in a really difficult financial situation. Some other friends of mine are quite well off. Beyond the financial aspect, I also started thinking about what we do every day for work, for fun, for life.

I have to say, the walk at midday, at midweek, showed me a lot of empty houses, lovely big houses with wonderful lawns and yards and ponds and play structures and basketball hoops, but they were totally deserted. So the people who are living in these beautiful places, don't seem to be living in them at all, rather they are somewhere else working so they can afford these houses, big expensive places to sleep at night. Or maybe they are all inside, working on their computers, trading stocks ... but it wasn't a day for that, it was a beautiful Spring day and at lunch time, you'd think they'd at least come out for a minute or two. The houses really looked empty and dead. More like the red plastic Monopoly hotels.

And then, as I tried to explain to my friend, I've been thinking about how we all spend so much time having a life that seems to be the kind of life other people have -- get up, get breakfast, get dressed, go to work, get there at 9:00, leave there at 5:00 or 6:00 or whatever, come home, eat dinner, watch TV -- and I suddenly found this really sad. That we come to this earth and that's all we can come up with for a life. I don't want to be the fire-eating woman in the circus or something, but I think I want more of a life than a person who lives in a box, leaves their box in the morning, gets in their box-with-wheels, drives to another office box, sits in that box for 8 hours, their butt spreading a little wider every day from just sitting there, goes home to their box, sits in front of the box, eats a frozen dinner out of a box, goes to sleep on their mattress and box spring.

I tried to explain, I'm trying to imagine a life -- that's all -- since I don't find much value in this other life someone has imagined for me. I'm walking all over the Monopoly board wondering about a life. I might need to ride the rails a while. I might need to try my luck with Chance. I might need to find a little green house and set it up on St. James Place and see how that goes. I don't know, but I want to feel I had a hand in imagining this life -- MY life.