Sometimes at night, when I get back home after 9 o’clock and the traffic has quieted down, I spend a bit more time in the car: talking on the phone, listening to music or a podcast, reading something on my phone from earlier that day.
On the boulevard where I live there is a tram that passes by: slow, tired, teetering like an old tipsy man, who knows that he needs to go home. It is the same tram from 40 years ago with more rust and noise, with its parts weaker than before. However, the tram runs many times a day from one end of the line to the other, dutifully.
Similarly, some people live their lives from day to day: they wake up, wash, eat as they should, go to work, do what they must do, go home, watch TV, talk about politics, eat and go back to sleep again. The French call it the chain metro-boulot-dodo. We are highly passive; what takes us out of the ordinary makes us tired, people with a lot of energy annoy us, the same with those with a lot of interests and those who talk about different subjects.
I hear sometimes people saying: ‘but why are you so interested in so many things?; Why do you want to know something from so many fields? Why are you doing so many courses, learning so much?’
Because I exist; because I want to put my mind to good use, as best I can; because inertia bores me stiff, and depresses me; because it seems to me that there are so many attractions in this world that a whole life would not be enough to cover them; because my mind suffocates without novelty, surprises, hope.
To do our job daily like the tram would represents a form of oppressive poverty. We end up dissatisfied with ourselves, with the others, with our surroundings. We lose years of our lives in this state of lethargy. But someday we will wake up and I hope that it will be sooner, rather than a later, when we might be full of regrets.