Somewhere Between Mammoths and Stock Markets, We Lost Something...

It seems that my brain cells prefer to put in some over time just before it shuts down for the night (leaving only the most essential systems running, of course).  I usually take about 30 minutes to fall asleep on normal nights (which isn't good, if I remember correctly) and in those 30 minutes, I come up with my best, most philosophical, sometimes even bordering on absurd yet quite thought-provoking questions and stuff. That's terrible since I won't remember half of it when I wake up.

Well, don't expect much of that here, though, because my brain is still far from shutting down for the night. Fret not, for at times when I'm fully conscious with no expectations of falling asleep, I do come up with some ridiculous thoughts in a spectacularly messy way :) (meaning, my brain likes jumping around topics like a cartoon Lima bean).

Ok, I was going to write something about social pyramids. Something along the lines of how the huge egos of humans are what created this world that seems to be ruled by social hierarchy. I had an impressive argument, starting off with the Egyptian Pharaohs and stuff but then I got side tracked by a thing or two..

Here's the first: Cameron Mitchell. For those of you who do not know (you unfortunate little beings), he's the amazing guy from The Glee Project. Now, if you have not heard him sing, you have missed something truly beautiful. Trust me, your ears will be grateful. I know mine are:)

My two favourites from him are Blackbird (a Beatles cover) and Lost (an Aqualung cover). This guy has a beautiful voice and the way he sings is just something out of this world. I could listen to him sing all day long. I actually stopped typing when I heard his rendition of Lost, and therefore losing the whole social pyramid train of thought.

Note to self: Do not listen to Cameron Mitchell when writing/typing.


Anyway, I just wanted to express my love of Cameron Mitchell's singing voice.It's makes me go all googly and weak at the knees. Swoon-worthy, for sure.

Now, the next thing that derailed my original thought was this: What is wrong with the world? Specifically, the people in it. I know that this is a very general question which can lead to tons of different debatable answers, so let me narrow it down to what I mean at this moment in time. When did human beings lose our innocence?

Of course, the religious argument would be Adam, Eve and a sneaky snake as well as Cain, Abel, some weird smoke and an axe. I've heard the stories before a dozen times but I'm not dumb and neither are you. The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel are exactly that; stories. They're not real. It's just something the old timers came up with to explain our existence in this world, and of course sin, from a religious point of view (and by 'old timers' I mean those who wrote the book of Genesis).

So, that brings us back to the question. Where did our innocence go? Somewhere along the way, from being  hairy two legged creatures eating raw meat to the cave men that discovered fire and invented the wheel and then becoming the suit wearing, money hungry, power crazed people that we are today, we lost it. The most important part of our humanity got lost in translation while we were busy procreating. This then led to the worst part (to me) of modern history, the Holocaust.

Where, in between killing mammoths as the means of survival and harvesting rubber to fuel the industrial age did we drop our love of life? Not just the love of our own lives but that of others as well? How on Earth did we become these creatures that we are today?

Here's a breakdown of what we have become:
We are simple creatures who spend most of our time trying to earn enough money to get by. We live our entire lives trying to be someone; score well in school to get into a good university which, then, leads to more studying so as to get god grades and a good job. All that because we need to earn money to be able to feed ourselves and provide for our family. We keep reaching for more and when we get that, we reach further because that's all we know. We're explorers, discoverers. We keep going further and further. We want more. We never settle, we don't want to.

That's what we are.

There's good and bad, of course, in what we are today but I do feel like the bad is winning at the moment. We talk about beauty all the time. We talk about how pretty a rose is or how sweet honey tastes. We go on about love like it's the key to heaven on earth. We speak of music and philosophy, of politics and economics, of the beauty of life.

But how many of us truly appreciates these things? Whenever I walked in the tube stations of London, I saw a few specially designated spots for musicians to set up and play. For them to offer some beauty in the dull underground stations.Sadly, no one stopped. Sure, one or two people dropped some change into the musicians waiting guitar case or hat as they passed by but not one person took time off their busy schedules to stop and just listen, even for a second, to the beauty emanating from these musicians. Doesn't this prove that we're missing something? That, in our quest for 'more' and the great unknown, we have lost our sense of life? Our sense of real beauty?

If we can't take time off our days to stop and smell the roses, taste the honey and listen to some simple, original music in a dull subway, I think we're missing a huge part of life itself. Don't you believe that if everyone, and I mean everyone, from the Wall Street broker to the thief down the road, would just pause for a moment each day and realise how much real beauty our world holds, that the world would be a better place? I think so.

I think if everyone would just stop trying to out do each other, this world would be bliss. There would be no Hitler or mighty Pharaohs killing millions of slaves just to build a tomb. There wouldn't be any Pyramids either but I think I could live with that. I think this ideal world is entirely possible.

Here's the hard part; not everyone is going to jump on the bandwagon. Not everyone wants a world of beauty. And so we're stuck on this huge orb, all trying to survive and all looking for the great unknown. That better 'something' that is guaranteed to give us happiness. And while we're doing that, we try not to miss the blooming roses or the buzzing bees.