To be or not to be, again

It has been a strange couple of months... every friend I am talking to seems to be soul searching, being in a similar state of mind (usually, particularly now) I have wholeheartedly taken part in these discussions. Everyone seems to be tired of the rat race and the futile yearning for the unknown.

One friend, a writer, tells me that she is tired of all the inanity in life, the day to day plodding, stress to make the ends meet, I feel the same way (and the ends keep stretching apart). 

Another friend, a cinematographer told me that he is tired of doing mediocre work and the hope that someday he can give it all up and do the stuff he loves and enjoys (Same story, same story here). 

This evening a friend in a rather cushy corporate job was saying the very thing I have been thinking- if we keep toiling towards creating that perfect life when will get around to living it.

The way I see it, there are only two ways of doing it either we resign ourselves to our current lives and make the best of it and continue to crib (and secretly fantasise about how and when we will get out) or we get out and start living it just the way we want it (for life is indeed a bitch and then we do die). 

But darlings, the question is do we really know what we want? Do we have the guts to step out of this comforting cocoon (however inward looking) we have made for ourselves?  I am constantly saying I want to get out of the city but am I really ready to leave my bourgeoisie South Delhi life? Are we ready to give up the little luxuries and labels we have got used to and live a spare but soulful life? 

The great, Phillip Larkin comes to my rescue again and very succinctly sums up the dilemma: 

Toads

        - Philip Larkin

 

Why should I let the toad work


Squat on my life?


Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork


And drive the brute off?

 

Six days of the week it soils


With its sickening poison -


Just for paying a few bills!


That's out of proportion.

 

Lots of folk live on their wits:


Lecturers, lispers,


Losels, loblolly-men, louts -


They don't end as paupers;

 

Lots of folk live up lanes


With fires in a bucket,


Eat windfalls and tinned sardines -


They seem to like it.

 

Their nippers have got bare feet,


Their unspeakable wives


Are skinny as whippets - and yet


No one actually starves.

 

Ah, were I courageous enough


To shout Stuff your pension!


But I know, all too well, that's the stuff


That dreams are made on:

 

For something sufficiently toad-like


Squats in me, too;


Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,


And cold as snow,

 

And will never allow me to blarney


My way to getting


The fame and the girl and the money


All at one sitting.

 

I don't say, one bodies the other


One's spiritual truth;


But I do say it's hard to lose either,


When you love both.

More to follow on this, along with more of the brilliant Philip Larkin.