Let's take it easy..lift an article from the newspaper..
Hanging On For Dear Life(Lifestyle, 9 Dec 07)
'..What's hit me is how precious life is and grossly we waste it fretting over shallow things like money and recognition.
Can you call what most of us do really living? Or are we squandering what's essentially a priceless nanosecond of sentient existence obsessing over things that don't, or shouldn't, matter?
At the heart of modern-day existence is the warped belief that if you don't have a highfaluting career and the showy trappings to match(in other words, if you're just ordinary) then you're a failure. But what about those who lack the pre-requisite skills for glory or who simply don't want it? Are we to be filed under 'washouts'?
It happened at a dinner party one night in 1987 when the conversation drifted to the latest thing in hot(forgive the pun) kitchen appliances, microwaves. This wasn't your typical chinwag about household helpers, mind you, but an absurd boasting session of the kind one might expect about Ferraris. Incidentally, our host drove one but he'd bragged about that already.
Something snapped when I was asked 'Does your microwave oven rotate?' 'Well, not exactly, but you should see its balance beam routine'
Truth be told, i didn't own a microwave oven and didn't care to. Moreover it appalled me that the only thing my status-conscious dinner companions could think of to talk about was bloody ovens, even if it took all night.
Whatever happened to the great gab fests over beer in student pubs when people used to talk about real things, i wondered. Apparently, my peers had lost the plot and now believed that life boiled down to their branded microwaves.
To my mind, all of this equated with not living. So after seeking a dear friend's sagely advice, I decided to change my life, ditch my jon and supported myself by freelance writing, teaching and whatever odd-jobbing i could find.
That's what i've been doing ever since. Now i'm free to tag along on my husband's abundant vacations(he teaches in an international school) and i've gotten to see the world, something you can't put a price tag on.
But this lifestyle has nonetheless come at a cost, although it's a cost i don't care about. I'm not a bigwig. I'll certainly never be rich. And sometimes, at parties when people ask me what i do and then walk away, it's painful.
Why bother clawing our way up meaningless ladders when no one will ever remember, much less care about, the job or prestigious address we had after we're gone?
For certain, there really is a whole lot more to life than microwave, don't you think?'
