Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Aug 5, 2003
Why?
Why is it that we humans put ourselves through so much torture every day just to meet modern day conventions?
I mean, we go for an interview for a job or position, depending on which pigeon hole we class ourselves in. We arrive at the interview so full of stress and anxiety that we literally feel sick, sweating palms and fear. Why? Will it make such a difference to the world if we don't get the job? Will it cause a crash in the market? Of course it won't - life will still go on as before, and you can still look around for another job. It's when we are in these stressful jobs we feel tense, nervous in case something goes wrong. Yet when you have left the job you look back on it and realise that you put yourself through all that for nothing.
That big, overbearing boss you once feared, is just a figment of your memory now. So, you could have told him exactly what you thought at the time, but its too late now. If we attend a funeral, for example, we are expected to cry and mourn this sudden loss. What if you took a sudden attack of the giggles as you remembered something humourous the deceased had done while they were alive? This has happened to me, and the tears I shed were not of grief as everyone thought. I must admit to feeling guilty when someone came to comfort me. I just could not help it; this man was just so full of fun and jokes when he was alive, that some of his antics just came to my mind there and then. I was not mourning a death, I was remembering a life full of funny events. We are all expected to behave in a manner that meets convention but who sets the rules? Who will decide how you are going to behave today?
My best memory of my non-conventional behaviour was attending an interview, and a colleague told me his secret just before I went in, the result of which was finding me leaving the room and indeed the building in fits of laughter. My so called friend had said to me: 'Just imagine the interview panel sitting there naked.' So, with that in mind, I entered to find a panel of the ugliest people that I had ever seen! This sent me into a fit of laughter. No, I never got the job, but at least I had another happy memory of a dear friend whose funeral I was attending that day. Even after he was gone I was laughing at his memory. OK it might not have been the conventional way to behave, but I didn't care, and I'm sure my friend wouldn't care either.
Are we to be outcast for not conforming to what society dictates to us, for not behaving the way one should in that pigeon hole in which we have been placed? Life is too short, especially for people who see it taken away every day. We see them crying as they leave the hospital, along with the families of people who are crying for joy, as their loved one has just had a lifesaving operation. It's when we get older that we wish we had thrown away convention when we were at the age to have made a difference.
