Fear is the prime motivator.
Somebody recently regurgitated the old joke, “birth is the leading cause of death” which I am afraid, I have reason to disagree.
I am afraid I must take the side of Mel Gibson’s character, William Wallace, from Braveheart: “Everyone dies, but not everyone really lives.” I am certain this quotation is bastardized somewhat, but, hey, it’s my blog, and I don’t really care.
The point is, if not everyone lives, then what are the hallmarks of a ‘living person’?
I think I might take an aside at this point: I am afraid of everything. Lately, I’m afraid of Americans. Back to our topic.
I would say that our pseudo-lives are marked by fear – we pull our hands back from fire and we don’t like to fall from planes – we are afraid. These things keep us alive. In fact, if you were to sit down and analyze it, our pseudo-lives are so marked with fear, that we move along a pseudo-hierarchy of needs, all the way up to pseudo-self-actualization, at which point, we might be pseudo-happy.
Fear of being naked, fear of being hungry, fear of being alone, fear of being unrewarded, unrecognized – these things all move us pretty far up the line, don’t they?
How far? If these fear inspired accomplishments aren’t ‘real’ enough, what is the gauge for ‘real’ – how do we obtain a ‘real’ happiness?
Life is an experience, isn’t it? I can only sense that there is a real happiness, but since I am not yet self-actualized, I am afraid I can’t tell you what it is. It is almost as though the ‘real’ happiness is just barely beyond my realm of perception, yet I can clearly tell that it is there, and I could almost swear to you that I’ve had run-ins with such a thing.