A Natural Environment

I fell from five feet above, right on my tailbone – it didn’t hurt a bit. The layers of mud underneath my body were almost bubbling under the sun’s heat, as they cushioned my fall from the boat. I was mud sliding.

 
I was one of the first off the boat and could have been one of the first to the top of the muddy mound, but I didn’t want to move. Paralysed by the shear height of the wet, slippery mountain of clay I saw in front of me, I continued to star up at it. I felt like I had been shrunken. I felt like I was at the base of a mountain of chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup melting down every side. The lines of chocolate syrup were paths that my friends had now carved from sliding down the otherwise undisturbed giant chocolate sunday.

When I finally decided to move, I could hardly stand. I loved sinking into the hill of chocolate and felt like I was swimming, except that every movement was in slow motion. I was so relaxed and had no desire to go anywhere fast. I couldn’t. I used my hands in teamwork with my feet, clawing away at the clay. My feet, however, were becoming casualty to the strong suction of the chocolate ice cream. When I pulled, it was like a quiet, painful screech - like the earth did not want to give back my foot. As if to wave a white flag of submission, the earth gave a quiet but articulated ‘pop’ and I was momentarily free from the earth’s grasp. But the sudden release caused me to loose my balance and I fell face-first into the mud. Without thinking, I opened my mouth and the chocolate ice cream did not taste like I remembered. The mixture of soft, bitter clay and unidentified debris on my tongue made me wish I would never swallow again. It disrupted my calm and caused my tongue to do summer-salts in my mouth.

I heard my friend call my name and I forgot about my sour chocolate snack. I jammed my toes into the mountain and felt the soggy earth being thrust between my toes. As I climbed, I scraped clay from the hill with my toenails and fingernails. I was breathing hard, arguing with gravity to let me make it to the top. The air smelled old and there didn’t seem to be enough of it. The sun made my body feel 400 pounds. As I pulled my body over the top, the wind filled my lungs with new air. I could taste and smell fresh pine from the forest where the wind had recently been. Covered in mud, I felt that the air was the only clean thing about the afternoon.

I finally joined my friends at the top of the mountain of chocolate ice cream. We held hands and slid down the crevasses of the hill together, only to land chest-deep in the warm muck where I had first begun. 

What's Important to Me

Did you know that the average person spends about 10 years of their life working?

That’s what Google says, anyways. If you think about it, that’s just an average number that probably includes a lot of people who don’t work at all. With this information, I have deduced that someone like myself, with a university education, in a developed country, with plenty of resources and job opportunities, will probably spend somewhere close to 12 years of my life working.

Wow.

I’m thinking to myself that this is a lot of time to spend doing something that I don’t like. I believe that life is something we are given to enjoy and our only job is to contribute to everyone’s happiness, including our own. Finding a job and working for about 12 years of our lives can help us accomplish these two main goals. First, find a job you like; find one that makes you feel valued and like you are part of an organization or community. This is an integral part of finding your own happiness. Second, many of us in the West have the power to help others in the world find happiness. Performing our daily jobs tasks may only be a teeny, tiny piece of the puzzle but why do you think there are seven billion other people on the planet?

There are many different ways you can look at the world but I will forever be an optimist. Your full-time job may be to sell clothing and this may make you happy because you enjoy fashion and trends. Your happiness – check! But this job will play, perhaps, just a small part in making someone else happy. Everyday, you sell clothes to people who, maybe just for an instant, feel better about themselves. Maybe they feel stylish in the shirt you sold them; maybe that shirt won’t give the bullies at school anything to laugh about; or maybe they finally saved up every penny they owned to buy that shirt and they won’t be cold tonight because you sold it to them. Contribute to someone else’s happiness – check! In every job you do, you have the opportunity to be part of someone’s happiness. It is important to me that everyone finds this opportunity and sees the “big picture.”

I have had moments in my life where I thought, life is meant to enjoy and work is simply imposed by society as “what must be done.” I remember thinking, do I really need to work? I could simply make enough money to fly down to Jamaica and live off the earth for the rest of my life. But that wouldn’t be enough.

So this is when it hit me that, that is why so many people work. If we were fortunate enough to be put on this earth with all of these tools to make ourselves happy, why not use them to help make others happy, too? Part-time jobs, careers, professions – these are all ways to help us reach the two main goals in life, a) be happy and, b) help make others happy. This is why you need to like what you do. Just use these two goals to guide you and you can’t go wrong. If you could do that, I would really appreciate it.