Endless Loop

The Alarm sounds off. It's eight o'clock in the morning. He turns to his side, ignoring the buzzing sound and goes back to sleep for another half hour before the alarm buzzes off again. This happens until it's nine-thirty and he finally gets out of bed, heads to the shower, changes his clothes, pours some cereal and milk into a bowl and eats breakfast, packs his computer and drives twenty minutes to work.

At work, earphones on, mp3 player in the background playing Bethoven's Moonlight Sonata, volume up, eyes glued to the computer monitor, fingers busy typing words and numbers, solutions to problems, letters, meeting invitations, email responses. He checks the internet for stock prices and interest rates once and then goes back to work. At twelve-thirty, he gets up to the cafeteria or drives down to his favorite restaurant to get lunch.

Back at work, a meeting appointment snoozes. He picks up his laptop and heads down to the meeting room where he'd sit for at least an hour listening to a seemingly endless exchange of non-sense cliché's like going forward, basically, more than anything, in the first place, contributing his own just for fun, and counting the number of times any speaker inserts you know or though in between words within the same sentence as if it was a comma.

At six o'clock, he packs his laptop, books, and notes and gets ready to leave the office. He goes home, takes a shower, eats (and/or cooks) dinner, watches TV for a couple of hours, writes some email, surf the internet for a few minutes, turns off the light at twelve-thirty and goes to sleep.

Seven and a half hours later, the alarm sounds off...again!

What if time is an unending loop (Einstein calls it a "circle bending back on itself") and none of us is aware that every single event in our lives gets repeated over and over and over again? Even if it isn't, notice how people seem to fall into a routine, consciously or unconsciously, whether or not they planned it, and whether or not they wanted their lives to be that way?

We fall into a certain comfort zone that becomes more and more difficult to get out of the longer we stay in it, even if it makes us horribly miserable, depressed, and stressed. What really causes the depression, sadness, and stress is not the condition we are in but the fear of getting out of that condition, the fear of leaving our comfort zone for the unknown, and the fear of the unknown. If we can learn to admit to ourselves what it is that we're afraid of, then maybe we can do something about that fear so that we can step out of this paralyzing comfort zone that keeps our world and our lives stuck in endless circles.

And
then
maybe
we
can
also
start
to
really
LIVE!


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Interesting reads on the theories on time and conquering your fear: Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, and What Are You Afraid Of? by Lavinia Plonka.