Many people look for a second life because they feel unsatisfied. They turn to extramarital affair. They turn to hanging with girls. They look for a second life in online communities where they can pretend to be someone else. Getting a second life is extremely tempting and so easy to dream up, but is it worth it if you don’t pursue your first life with everything you’ve got?
I don’t think so, although I understand the temptation and lure of wanting something new and exciting to happen.
Online you can be a great warrior and battle dragons. You can choose to save damsels in distress, or join up with an fierce Amazon warrior and try to pick a fight with somebody. Online you can reinvent yourself as many times as you can imagine or find the time to do.
The question remains. Before you do that, are you living life to the fullest? Are you pursuing your dreams with the same vigour and determination as your second life?
If life is so bad that you need to escape with a margarita on the weekend, perhaps it’s time to escape what you are doing in real life. If you hate your job or the people you work with, than waiting twenty more years to retire, or counting down the days to your next vacation may not be a very wise move. A second life cannot make up for the neglect of your first one, and quite frankly, we only have the one anyhow.
As much as I can intellectual carve out the idea of a second life, in reality, we only get one. Regardless of how much we pretend, distract ourselves, or wish otherwise, we only have now, and thank God we have now, because there are great things in store for you if you choose to believe.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that a distraction is just a distraction. It is far more than that. There is no ‘just’ in life.
Boredom. Nothingness. Chillness. See you on the downlowness. Take it easiness. It all comes out of the same time account. Whatever you choose to dream or work, or distract yourself, the cost is the same. You pay with time. Time you cannot bank or yield an interest from.
You will either be moving forward or you will be moving backward. There is no standing still. There is no just. Standing still is actually moving backward. It’s so because things are always in perpetual motion. You are either swimming or sinking in quicksand. Just like your heartbeat. It never stops. It’s a perpetual line of moment. No stops. No breaks. A fluid wave of ups and downs. You cannot stop life from happening, and so you either choose to walk forward or else you are resigned to fall back.
I am not throwing rocks at glass houses. Having a second or third or a fourth life seems very tempting at times, but we were not built to fly from one dandelion to another. We are not bees. We are people who need to seize the moment, seize our day and take care of our first life. The life that’s precious. A life that holds so much promise if we just work and let it be.
Cover photo generously provided by photographer Steve Harvey via unsplash.com
