Third Party Living

There was an invitation in cyberspace recently to submit in one line your own personal answer to the following - “Before I die I want to.............”

Some of the answers were -

Travel the world

Swim with dolphins

See tigers in the wild

Drive a racing car

Climb Everest

Visit the Galapagos Islands

Learn to play the guitar

I wonder how many of those people who replied will ever get to live their one liners? Why do we get distracted from them? 'Reality' takes over and by reality I suppose we mean shopping, cleaning, putting food on the table, commuting day after day after day. I'd hate to think that was it, that I was doomed to stay within this 'reality' circle for the rest of my natural born.

The majority of us seem to be content to keep our one liners as pipe dreams as we go for the easy safe option and watch someone else do it for us. No risk there, no need to get immersed up to our armpits in mud in our quest to see a rare elusive animal. We can watch tv and get the experience in a sanitised safe way. We can have the visual memory but what we can never have through this medium is the effect on all our other senses. The damp musty smell of jungle vegetation, the aching muscles in our legs caused by reaching that mountain peak but we got up there anyway and the view was breathtaking, popping seaweed pods between our fingers and thumbs, how cool and refreshing that bottled water tastes in our mouth when we stop for a well earned break on a long walk. Taking the easy path will result in a future big empty hole in our memories while we try to work out what we did with our lives.

I wonder what would happen to us if we all made an effort to live our one liners. Would we put Mr Murdoch out of business by creating our own memories instead of the ones dreamt up by Fox's finest.

Friends is apparently the most repeated series on tv. Six different personalities; plenty of scope there for us to choose our own favourites and identify with them throughout their fictional struggles with life in the Big Apple. We get so involved with the characters that we forget they are made up; Ross and Rachel do not exist. They are not our friends, the same way that Tesco/Sainsburys etc are not looking out to make life better for us, they are just plain and ordinary shops. I am not impressed with 'every little helps' or smacking my backside every time I reach the checkout, just put the damn things out on the shelves and I'll buy it if I need it.

Life has become safe, scripted and I find that incredibly scary. Even our hobbies are getting the scripting treatment these days. There is something so heart rendingly sad about a person standing alone at home on a wobbly board looking at a screen and pretending they are skiing down a mountain. What's wrong with actually booking a real life skiing trip and please don't say cost. For the price of one of these wobbly boards you could have a super holiday with a load of apres ski thrown in. Oh and you could actually meet up with other human beings and possibly create some lasting marvellous memories, what a bonus that would be.

In real life there are no certainties, perhaps that's what scares us these days. We don't get a preview of what is going to happen to us in next Saturday's 7.30pm to 8.30pm time slot. Far better to not risk anything and to stay in our comfort zone. Thankfully there are people out there in the world who are not content to let their sofas do a mind meld with their backsides. Ordinary real life people like the PA who gave up corporate life to fulfil a passion to paint animal portraits. The gardener who one year ago was shouting himself hoarse on the stock exchange floor and now the only sounds he hears are the birds singing and hedgehogs snuffling for slugs in the undergrowth. Being responsible for ourselves is probably the biggest challenge we of the sofa generation face in these PC/Nanny State/Health & Safety times.

But it can be done and done well. All we have to do is find our own one liner, then focus and LIVE!