A LETTER FROM GARTH

    As my friends and I sit at the beginning of our careers with hopeful dreams and fresh thoughts I can't help but have a slight apprehension. A quiet feeling that something is amiss and somewhere, somehow, along the way I missed something really terribly important. I look around at these people whom have shared pain and joy with me in play, education and work and wonder if we don't have it all wrong. And last month, after the graduation and the freedom that seems to come with it had died away somewhat, I relized what was tickling at the edge of my mind. I relized why I had been searching for a greater meaning, why I had never been content with the upward drive and competitiveness which this 'western' society instills in everyone from birth.

    The explanation was really quite simple. We were all living for tomorrow and judging our every action by how it would eventually get us to that big, unknown-yet-omnipotent prize in the future. We put off the now for the future and in this act lose the only time we really have. We get up and go to work and sleep and get up and go to work and repeat this cycle until we stop questioning, and start tallying our success in life by the number of zeros in our bank account. And then try to ignore the feeling of emptiness we feel at the end of the day.

    We were sacrificing our most precious resource, time, in the drive for something that, ultimately, means very little...for, you see, we all die. And it all ends in the same way no matter if you are a wealthy person, of the middle class or a poor man in the street...everyone is even at the end. The only difference is how these people live every moment of every day in the here and now.

    I'm not saying that ambition is not needed and that an attempt to better your situation in life is bad. But many trade what really matters, family and friends and the basic joys of the moment, for material gains in an almost neurotic fashion. You make the deliberate choice to live with joy and light just in the act of being here...or you constantly strive and suffer for what is a common end anyway. Not much of a choice if you ask me!

    Live for the moment and, as my father says,'...walk where the sun shines!'

    By Garth




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