I have seen a lot of people the last four weeks, in the subways, in the streets, in the bars and cafes. Often they look like zombies, sometimes healthy and strong, sometimes holding hands or making out, but nonetheless there is a certain limit to their depth. A lack of vibrancy, curiosity; a level of complacency or acceptance, which outweighs the will to seek self-betterment. And I think when a man, who lives and feeds in comfort, allows himself to sit in that comfort, he also dies of starvation in a very real sense. The soul, bereft of passion, shrivels and breaks.
I think there is a fire inside us all. Sometimes it lies dormant, but it always wants to be heard.
Well, perhaps just venting my own doubts, how much of a choice do we really have in our life?
ReplyDeleteRecently, a friend at work was explaining to me about experiment done presumably in Russia on raising generations of foxes. Two groups were selected: an aggressive kind and "mellow". The "mellow" group was producing always new "mellow" generations and aggressive - aggressive. Attempts to switch parents when an aggressive individual was given for "adoption" to gentle parents was changing nothing. The same result was when doing an opposite swap. 50 years and generation of foxes later shows that who we are really depends on our genetic buildup and not so much on the social environment. The question comes to my mind: how much of free will do we really have and, how much is already hard-coded before we are even born?
Adam
I suppose we don't have a choice of who/what we are in terms of the elements that make us up, but I think we do have a choice of whether we "go with it" or not. I think it's easy to let the head take over and act in a way that seems correct in given circumstances, perhaps fulfilling someone else's expectations (whether it's a person or a social system), while dulling our own sense of self-awareness. Foxes are what they are, and in that way they're probably smarter than humans.
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