I woke up today

Today

I woke up today in what felt like...well I don't even know what it feels like. They say I've been gone for 15 years. Lost, Sleeping, in a void, call it what you may, but I opened my eyes to a different world. Strange, distant and empty.

I saw my fiance, I think her name was Grace when I vanished, smile and tell me how great it is to have me back. I could see she'd brought some kids with her to see me and they were running around the white tiled floor, making squeaking noises as they tumbled along. Must be around 8 or 9 years, but kids keep growing faster every generation, so I wouldn't be sure. They look at lot like her and someone else, and nothing like me. Perhaps they are her children, am too scared to ask.

I can hear the monitors go beep beep, every third second, reminding me of my position at the moment. The Nurse showed me a list of people who visited me over the time, but I think I hardly remember or recognize the thinning line of people in the recent times. The last name looks like mom though. I wonder how she is, where she is. I hope she is.

I don't see any flowers or balloons that you'd expect visitors to leave when someone came back. That's what they used to show us in the movies. I wonder if they show the same stories in movies these days. Or if they even have movies these days. I wish I could see a movie right now, would be nice. They have this giant screen in the room across mine, but my doctor said they had removed all the stuff from my room because it wasn't being paid for and it wouldn't matter since I wasn't awake anyway. I don't know what he means by not awake, but I dare not ask questions, the answers to which might lead to painful memories.

The room doesn't have windows any more, my nurse keeps telling me new things every day. She says the atmosphere is too harsh to have windows anymore, and people have to walk around in suits and masks, or specially made vehicles that allow these things. It's dangerous, she says, to my poor health. I look at my skin which is almost a dull blue now. I wonder how old I am. I wonder how I look. Do I still have a job? What happened to my Dog? Do my best friends miss me? Did someone try to kill me? Is my Facebook account still active? Is the sky still blue? Are tigers extinct? Do people still go to church on Sundays?

I have so many questions. My mind just won't stop. But no one's come to see me yet. I think they don't know yet, at least I'd like to think so. Maybe am in a very far off place that makes it difficult for people to come visit. Or perhaps I did something bad that got me here and people hate me. I can't remember much from the past. But I do have some pictures run through my head now and then, of times that were good and fun. I just watch them float by in my head like white fluffy clouds on a bright summer day.

They've got all sorts of things attached to my head. I fall asleep often, I can't stay up for more than an hour, it feels like an hour almost, now. The only thing am sure of is what the code on my wrist.

It says #23437M Dec 17th, 2029.

Do you have a choice?

Ever since I gathered my thoughts, I've been a supporter of choice, of having that option in every sphere of life. But only recently has that brought on a new meaning.

We all hate taking tough decisions, which of course is a choice you make. I myself have begun to see that am going to have make a few choices that would effect a lot of my future soon, and I realise that it isn't actually in the future as much as it is right now, the only thing pushing the choice into the future being - me.  And this procrastination has made me very unhappy.

By choosing one thing, you actually un choose a whole lot of other options, ones you perhaps didn't even know existed. Choices you didn't even worry about because you never knew they were there. Which is profound in a way.

     

Then again if you choose not to make a choice, you just stay there, stagnate and die. So making a choice is not just about right and wrong, it's actually about survival.

If you need to survive, you HAVE to make a choice. There is no way you can choose not to. In fact everything you do is a choice. To think otherwise would be foolish.

You can never measure the outcome of the choices you left, at best making guesstimates of how it might have been. But then again even the choice you make in your favour rarely turns out like we expect them, do they?

I remember a debate sometime back where people said do innocents who die in a terrorist attack choose to be there? Well they chose to be in that spot, and the terrorist attack was something they didn't know about. And isn't that a lot like most of our situations, where the future cannot be predicted with certainty? Of course perhaps not so extreme a circumstance, but unknown nonetheless?

Again am not talking about bad or good choices. Like if you choose to jump off a cliff, there is a high risk that you will die. That's like pretty sure thing. It's a bad choice if your trying to fly, a good choice if you want to die a painful death. But that's not what am writing about. Am trying to focus more on the other daily life, work life, relationship life choices we make.

I guess in totality, we spend more time analysing things we choose but the energy is hardly equal to the results we actually get. Hence speed is of essence, make that choice, make that decision and move.

That being said, the question arises - why should we think about choosing at all? What's the point? Well the point would be that if you didn't think about it at all, your technically putting your survival at the hands of luck, a decision which your rational brain will not allow you to make. A human brain is designed to survive, not to think. And as being rational, it will force you, at some level to somehow  make that choice which had even the slightest advantage of survival than not.

Choices are also blurred by emotions, which perhaps is a close second to rationale in the brain. Make no mistake that to your brain, survival is always primary.

So how do you make the right choice? The perfect solution?

The answer is you can't. You may think it is, perhaps it even might be, but you'll never know.

And therefore coming to my philosophy - at any given time and situation, you have already made the best choice you could have, and there's nothing you can do about that particular choice once its in the past.

Cheers
M