Nothing
happened. Or maybe it did. I’m writing this a couple of weeks before the actual
solstice, since I have plans and won’t be online much today. So who knows?
Maybe Planet X did crash into us, and we’re all spiraling into deep space right
now, and not even a Brit in a phone booth can save us.
But
I doubt that.
Really, I do. Maybe
it’s just my generation. I was sorely disappointed with the Y2K disaster when I
was fifteen. I slept through the Rapture (There’s something symbolic here, I’m
not sure what.). I didn’t hear about the Hale-Bopp freaks killing themselves to
join Mork on his spaceship until after the comet was long-gone. I was laid up
for a weekend with Swine Flu once, but that was as close as I ever got to the
big pandemics. All in all, my peers have become kind of immune to the
apocalypse. When it finally does hit, we’ll be so used to it that we’ll have
recovered before it’s even over. Zombies? Pfft, I survived Black Friday. I went
grocery shopping while that part of Wal-Mart was empty and laughed at the
screams coming from the electronics section.
Incidentally, if you’ve
ever participated in a Black Friday, I do not want to hear you complain about
“putting Christ back in Christmas.” I mean it. Fuck off.
Anyway, we’ve been
hearing about the Mayan Apocalypse for at least five years, with varied
responses. I don’t think many people actually believed it, and those that do…
well, they’re all in bomb shelters right now with tinfoil on their heads, so
whatever. But it was all over the internet, to the chagrin of my Spanish
professors. It had almost nothing to do with actual Mayan beliefs, though.
Thanks to the Judeo-Christian mind-set that pervades our culture, we have a
very linear view of time. Beginning. Middle. End. Cause, followed by effect. The
Mayans did not see the universe this way; they were cyclical. It’s not the end
of all things, any more than the new Millenium was for us.
I have to ask you,
though: What if it were the end? What
if it had been? Pretend for a moment. The world around you is crumbling, we
have about three minutes left to live.
How do you feel about
your life? The world around you? What have you done with the time you’ve had?
If you’re genuinely
happy about where you are, and what you’ve done with your life, then you’re one
among the very, very few. More likely, you’re lying through your teeth. Now
don’t be alarmed by this. Most people do. They’re pursuing whatever they’ve
been told is “good” to have and none of them ever thought about it, or whether
they really want it.
So think about it. Be
honest with yourself. I’m not asking for a verbal answer here. This is between
you and whatever deity you talk to, and honestly I think they’ve seen and heard
it all by now. What is it you’d regret, if today were the end? Everyone’s got something,
and most people have more than one thing. Is it something you wish you’d done,
or the person you wish you were? Perhaps it’s a person, someone you didn’t
pursue?
The next step is to
consider that most people don’t know exactly when their end is going to be. You
think you have fifty or more years, but you could very easily die in a freak
meteor strike in ten seconds. People keel over without cause every day.
With this in mind, it’s
time to ask yourself why the fuck you haven’t done this thing yet. And by the
way, “I don’t have time” is NOT a good excuse. It’s a cop-out way of saying
“it’s not important enough to me to make time for,” which kind of implies that
it’s not something to regret at the end of the world. Or it means you don’t
have the stones to pursue it, in which case you’re fucked and I have absolutely
no sympathy for you.
If it’s what you’d
regret not doing at the end of the world, then it’s time to take care of that
shit. Get some CDs of that language you always wanted to learn. Go back to
school. Look up that special someone on Facebook and say what you feel.
Try that one random
thing you always wanted to try out, if only to see whether it was worth wishing
for all that time. If it is, then continue. If not, well, you know that now.
It’s better to try and
fail than to regret not trying.
I dare you.
