SOME CANDID INTIMIDATION, IF YOU PLEASE



'Meaningless! Meaningless!' says the Teacher. 'Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!'

What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.

The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.

All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.

All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look, there is something new'?

It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.

You'll never believe where I got this stuff. Personally, I was so surprised at how contemporary it sounded, considering that it's from the Bible, and from the Old Testament, at that. Ecclesiastes 1:1-11. This part of the Scripture could easily be taken out of context just as it is. It sounds desperate, complaining, a bit damning even. Yet all of it is definitely true. And it's equally disheartening to think that somebody has had these thoughts way, way before our time.

What does that make of us then? What does it say of the times we're in?... of the lives we live?

It could easily be the plot for the movie, 'Groundhog Day', where the character, Phil (Bill Murray), finds himself trapped in a time warp in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. He happens along the worst day of his life, and by circumstances beyond his control, he is confined to wake up to it over and over and over again.

Can you consider this for a moment?

Consider taking everything that's worst in you into a bad-hair day and find that you have to live it, the same, exact succession of events, infinitely... like, forever.

And then take that into the bigger picture.

Isn't that life, as it is?

We wake up to the same unrealized dreams, go through hours of the same drone and groan, and retire to what would be a fidgeting stillness at best, an insufferable numbness at worst.

Oh yes, you may wrangle that it's not that bad, not that bad at all. And I will agree. I, for one, don't really have any viable complaints to air.

But why then do we sometimes find ourselves committing the same mistakes, curbing the same bad habits, or hurting the same people the same way? Why do we keep bumping into the same blind corner or falling into the same pit? Why do we get into the same arguments, and why, do tell me, do we keep hearing of the same bad news?

Now let's go back to the Groundhog Day scenario. Knowing then, what we knew the day before (which happens to be the same day now), would we live our lives in the same dismal stupor, allowing things to come and happen to us, without putting our own bit into it, without claiming our stakes on how things could be?

If we have bad relationships, would we carry on the same way, knowing that same ol' same ol' is not going to turn up into anything good... that as long as the 'how' doesn't change, the 'who' wouldn't matter at all? Nevermind who we throw ourselves to, it would always turn out bad. Do we leave this up to the other person, or do we take charge instead?

Do we let ourselves remain unaffected, in the face of everything that's happening about us, like some picture in a movie screen that's got nothing to do with us, or do we, as my friend Junnie once commented, 'grab a stone and move it somewhere'? Spark our own change, so to speak.

Bluntly, if we are so unhappy with ourselves, with our lives, are we so incompetent, so utterly inept, as to resign ourselves into waking up to the same morning, and live our lives as we have, over and over and over again?

Now think once more. Would it be such a preposterous assumption to say that maybe, just maybe, our days are patterned into the same likeness because it's the only way through which we can see what we're doing wrong, where we're going wrong, and how we're getting it all wrong? Thus and hence, perhaps we would discover how we can become better in going through our identical days, perhaps eventually mustering the best of ourselves and turning each of our days just right.

This is our life. This is our day. If it is going to be another Groundhog Day, it is entirely up to us.

Maybe it's time we woke up.

It may be the same sun, the same left-over light from yesterday, but it could be a whole new us basking in it.

Then, and only then, can we call it a brand new morning.