A Life of Existing

It’s funny how a song crosses your path and hits the very note of the feeling you’ve been exploring. I’ve had the idea of just existing on my mind lately. I remember hearing “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone” by Paula Cole as a child. I remember it hitting my heart even then.

I’ve looked around lately, especially at relationships, marriages specifically and it seems while many relationships are not bad, they aren’t good. It’s merely two people existing together. When I look at the lives of people around me it seems as so many people are just existing.

When my dad passed away in 2019, I didn’t cry. Not. One. Tear. I thought I was broken, but I knew I had already cried. My dad passed away a long time ago before I was even born. I cried for him and all the people who were not living. It was like he was living behind a veil. He couldn’t see the extraordinary life he had at his fingertips with his four daughters.

I can only presume why that was. Is there a point when our first dream falls through, and we decide to give up? Is it because it is so easy to get caught up in surviving life that we never live with any awareness and intention?

I think about this a lot in my own life. Where have I simply existed, not going after a dream, living as a victim of some circumstance? I get it. It’s hard when you’ve let life go one way to stop and change it. Your life is entangled with the lives of the people around you, and those entanglements can act as chains.

I often think of Thoreau’s quote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It hurts my heart. Why do we live this way? A slow death. That’s how I see my dad’s life, a slow death. When did he stop living? When did he stop chasing his dreams? Thoreau wrote those words in the 1850’s. Is this something fundamental to being human? The dance between individualism and collectivism?

I want to understand why some people wake up to this realization. I want to figure out why some people can correct their course while others stay frozen in time. I’m curious about this within myself. I have lived. I take risks and live my way, yet I still feel restless. This is the path we all take: we change external physical things. Those changes only take you so far before you realize the changes we look for are internal. Those changes must happen to our entanglements with the people in our lives. When we are in marriages where we exist together, it’s the ultimate vulnerability to liberate ourselves from the chains and choose to water our relationship as if it is a growing flower. And the deepest, most profound relationship we can do this with is our relationship with ourselves.