What’s your Caper?

Everyone has a reason to be. As soon as one looses a reason to be, there’s really no point left in staying in this world is there? Are you not curious for what awaits you in the after life? That is to assume, there is a life after death? Don’t worry, as easy as this post can turn into a religious debate, it won’t. I’m just simply throwing some ideas in the air and if you so happen to catch one of them, tell me how it goes.

We all work. Even if you were fortunate enough not to have to for the next few generations you would still manage to find something to do… something of interest. So lets assume that we’re all in our mid-20’s, young professionals spearheading our lives into the unknown, where everyday survived is a day closer to death. Now before death approaches, what is it that you plan to achieve? We’re all pretty much quarter way there so ask yourself, is my goal attainable? Can I achieve it in the given time frame? Well that’s where the variable lies… we do not know the exact time or date nor location of our demise.

You could look at this lack of information as life’s sole challenge. Seriously… The Only challenge in life could be to achieve all that is you wanted within “X” amount of years, and following this primary challenge are sub-challenges and mini-missions to complete. Yeah, you may think you’re purpose in life is to become the Chief Accountant of some Blue-Chip company, but if I were in charge of your life’s game-rules I’d end it right now just for a laugh. This idea however, leaves little hope for the unfortunate babies who don’t make it out alive? Just follow me out of context for a second but what sort of fucked up shit is that? The little dude didn’t even get a chance to breathe! Its as if our time-cards were pulled out of hat. But then again, when did life ever become fair?

Coming back to the Headline now… What’s your Caper?

Thinking about the rules of the game a little bit more tends to make you re-evaluate your reasons now doesn’t it? What is it that you want to do, that is so fucking important that it has to race your time of death, because what ever it is, it better be a damn brilliant idea. Is it to die for? Imagine dying knowing that you’ve been sitting around on your arse all day procrastinating about getting up for another beer? For fuck sake man, there’s just no time for that sort of thinking… because there’s just no time at all.

And that’s the answer to number two, kids, No Time. You may think you have fifteen minutes to catch the bus, but in actuality you may not even catch the bus at all? What on this physical earth of ours makes you think that you’re going to catch that 8.00 A.M. bus everyday of the week, without fail? Hope… Faith? Try again loser, nothing. Nothing on this earth can guarantee any movement. And if you think you’re in total control then flick over to the news and get a load of who died today, just be thankful it’s not your arse on the 6 o’clock tonight.

Before you call me a cynical son-of-a-bitch, just remember that you probably know who I am and if not, you will soon. You’ve heard it before but I’ll say it again. Life is fucking short, man. It’s short. Just the other day I was trying to remember what it felt like to wave an action-figure about and still feel impressed with my imagination. But it didn’t work. Who the fuck stole my imagination or rather, tarnished it. We go through phases in our lives that make it difficult for us to remember the past. The reason why we cant remember our childhood as clearly is because we are a totally different person from the kid we used to be. You hear about zany shrinks telling us to “find our inner-child” but despite popular belief of the cliche it does make a lot of sense.

As a child, you were as innocent as a white piece of paper and naive as the colour it was. Over time, the white piece of paper starts to fill with information, drawings and colours. From time to time it will get torn from the corners. Most of us, will have had our paper crumpled up and tossed away… we all know how that feels don’t we? Now if we were to try and erase some of those sketches, we could almost see some white patches. Of course, it’s not pure white as it was before but you’ll start to remember exactly who you were and believe it or not, even at that age you held your own set of beliefs and moral discipline. For you see, all the shit we do today and all the riff-raff we claim defies us, are just doodles and tears on a perfectly good piece of paper. We were the ones who implemented the persona, we were the ones who chose a certain path. This leads to responsibility.

You could blame your environment, social status or abuse for the person you’ve become today. But the fact of the matter is, you’re the one steering the ship and as we mentioned earlier, life is not fair. To deal with this fact is not an easy thing to do but if you manage to come to terms with it, you’re on your way to finding out what the fuck to do with your life.

I’ll speak for myself as I close this. The initial question was “What’s your Caper?” and my answer for that is, “To be able to live with myself until the day I die.” People are dealt different hands, some are similar to others but one thing’s for sure, like a game of poker, you don’t get to choose your cards but you sure as hell will make the best of what you’ve got. It may be easy to say this coming from a guy who gets paid to write, but if I were not a writer, I sure as hell wouldn’t wallow in my misery about what could have been. Success wont maintain happiness, take it from me, all I’ve seen money do was create all sorts of new problems a poor man wouldn’t want in the first place. And don’t get me wrong either I’m not talking about being content because I believe that contentment leads you to comfortability and being comfortable does not allow you to progress. When I said “To be able to live with myself until the day I die,” it means to express that taking responsibility for your actions, and accepting the outcomes will contribute to a healthier view of oneself. You have to agree that things will not always go your way, so why dawn on such desperate variables?…

…Move on and continue smiling because life is exactly that, a sequence of unpredictable shit.