I was driving home one night from work and in the distance I started seeing fireworks lighting up the night sky just over the tree line of a forest preserve. The colors were bright reds and vibrant yellows juxtaposed by cool shades of blue and green; all in all it was very impressive for a fireworks show considering that it was being put on to celebrate a local high school’s homecoming. The light show peppered my fairly routine ride home and it provided a welcomed, yet perhaps distracting reprieve from the normal grind as I was driving at the time. It did get me thinking though and I started to watch my fellow drivers reactions as we collectively headed north towards the high school.
Each red light that we stopped at I would look around at the various cars surrounding me and I would note just how many people were watching the fireworks. There was a mid-sized family SUV next to me with a father and son who were not only watching the show but seemed to be sharing the awe that I was. They were talking about the fireworks commenting on what colors they liked and how big each explosion was. Outside of the duo and myself, not a single other person seemed remotely interested in the spectacle that was unfolding before their eyes. The car to my left seemed more interested in his text messages while both at the red light and while in motion. The people in the car ahead of me seemed to hate the fact that they were even in the same car together. It was like almost no one else except the father, son and myself were even cognitively aware that there was this pageant of lights and sounds unfolding in front of our very eyes.
This got me thinking pretty hard because these reactions actually annoyed me. Here was this beautiful display illuminating the night sky in front of us and a solid majority of my fellow drivers were not even aware of it in the least. This started me thinking about just how jaded we have become in our modern life. Now, I am about to say something that I can totally see would label me as an “old man” - BUT - when I was younger I remember how something as simple as a firework display would bring people together and cast a spell of wonderment, filling people with joy as those filaments lit up the sky. It was just a small trivial thing that would break up the monotony of our daily lives with astonishment and become fodder for our imaginations.
Yet, here we were at a red light where 15% of the people there including myself seemed to not even care less. The fact that these people were not interested in watching fireworks is not the issue. The fact that these people seemed to not even care that they could partake in this lovely spectacle is the issue. Have we become so jaded that we cannot even just stop for two-seconds and enjoy the things we have around us?
Again, I stress very heavily, I’m not questioning this because I’m an old man now or I’m nostalgic for a “better time” or any of that crap. This is just an indicator of a pattern that I have been watching for sometime in people. Put is bluntly, people are just not giving a fuck about anything anymore. We seem to be trapped in wrapping our tiny little mammalian brain stems around our own self absorbed self importance that we forget to stop and smell the roses.
To quote Master Yoda: “This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.” Now granted the little mystical Muppet was making an analogy that Luke Skywalker was a self absorbed little shit who was untrainable in the ways of the Force, but think about it for a second: just how often do we think about where we are going and often to we not think about where we are? We are constantly battling for more time in our lives to do more stuff. We drive fast to get to someplace that we are already running late for. We eat food with little to no actually sustenance because it can be prepared quickly and consumed on the go because we are speeding to get somewhere that we are late for. We spend money we don’t have to buy the food that we shouldn’t eat as we drive recklessly towards a destination that we haven’t a chance in hell to get to on time. It’s this constant pattern of insanity and stupidity as we rush around fulfilling these future needs and yet we never stop long enough to live in the moment. Its like our lives are one day, someday, going to catch up with whatever the hell we keep rushing around towards and magically all of our running around will be worth in the end. The only thing is that we forget to live our lives in all this running.
Think about it: how many special moments have you missed in your life? How many times were you really there at that family function but you weren’t really there because your head was somewhere else? I bet as a people in our modern society a majority of us have never really been present in anything in our lives ever. We are always concentrating on what’s the next big thing or where is the new hip thing. The availability of anything that we really want is a mere mouse click away, so why would we ever not stop rushing around?
I guess what this has taught me is that we have to stop and smell the damn flowers every once in a great while. If we don’t, we’ll end up becoming so damn jaded that we won’ even appreciate something simple like fireworks.
