Another Monologue on Choices and Such

Apart from these words are things I'd never want to say. Still, I wonder, why can't I just say them?

We are people, and we make mistakes, but there are limits to everyone's patience, and once in a while, we must pay dearly for what we have, or have not, done. Must we wait until that time before we make any move?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his first discourse, defended his view that the restoration of arts and sciences has corrupted instead of purifying our morals. Harsh as it may seem, that what gives us so much pride and joy is what has brought us farther away from our natural goodwill, it's true, isn't it?

Funny how what we thought would be best for humanity has slowly taken away or humanity and turned us into nothing more than robots with no hearts, empty heads, and an appetite for knowledge.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not against the learning. In fact, I'm all for the learning. But still, being surrounded by people of varying degrees of intellect, I cannot help but notice that with every person I meet, a higher value of IQ means one or more "issue". While some of these people have some dark secret in their past, others are simply not as well-adjusted.

I remember one quotation from a TV show, "You can't be successful without being damaged." Think about it.

Personally, I actually believe this statement. I may not know much about anything, but I do know enough of myself to know that I wouldn't have gotten where I am right now if it wasn't for my past failures and disappointments. Isn't that how we are, people? We deal with our problems by focusing our energies on something, anything else. We work, and work, and work, until at the end of the day, we fall into dreamless sleep. We know it's not healthy, we know we have to face our issues sooner or later, but we do it anyway, and hope that our conflicts would be resolved on their own, but they never do.

Once in a while, we'd even encounter a person who is so immersed in his love for learning, that we can no longer see where the scholar ends and the human being begins - and we'd be jealous of these people, because they seem so at ease with how they deal with the world. So we strive to learn more, to be just like them. But shouldn't we be feeling sorry for them, and ourselves, instead? We have a beautiful world before us, though this beauty may be relative, and we fail to recognize the fact that we already know everything we need to know to live, and that everything else is just an added weight in our minds?

Now, maybe I just haven't been exposed to a vast enough network of people to say this for sure. But I'm pretty confident in concluding, at least for the crowd that I am familiar with, that indeed, it is what has hurt us that has made us want more from life, to make up for the damage that we took, and that as we work harder and harder, we forget to be ourselves and choose to be nothing more than robots.

Should this stop us from wanting to learn? No. But we must aim for a balance, a middle road between the Path of Learning and the Path of the Heart. We must choose to be in the middle position, because we have always had that choice.