This is a post I deleted a while back...

Soul Mates and Using the Word Inevitable Too Much...

“Oh somebody tell me why I’m on my own, if there’s a soul mate for everyone.”

It’s okay Natasha Bedingfield, it’s safe to assume that everyone has felt like this at some point. Listening to my guilty pleasures playlist on my computer, Miss Bedingfield’s hurt seeped through my ears and I began to wonder about soul mates.

Personally, I don’t believe in soul mates, serendipity or fate really. My outlook on the world is that everything we do, everything we choose is a choice, but one that was inevitable. Not due to some big life plan, but to sheer logic. It’s quite a confusing concept, but I figure that we are who we are, and we make the choices we make because of who we are. Things like how we are brought up, what life experiences we’ve had, our likes and dislikes.

The best example I can think of is my deciding to write a blog. Even though it was my decision, because of all of my history before the moment, and of all the history leading to that history, the choice was inevitable. If I look at a menu and think “chocolate cake or toffee sponge?” The choice I make may seem in the moment, but it was inevitable due to all the choices that had lead me to that one. Because of everything that’s ever happened to me, I was always going to choose the toffee sponge. Think of the start of your life as a straight line, and every single choice you make, no matter how big or small, splits the line into a fork, and you pick a prong and keep living.

Hope that makes sense…

Anyway, so back to soul mates. Plato wrote a myth called ‘Symposium” and it was essentially a story explaining the creation of man. Plato had a whole concept about how the initial stages of learning are bedtime stories, therefore they should indicate good morals. In Symposium, human started as a singular rounded form, with two backs, two heads, four legs and arms, then works. This form would travel via cart wheeling everywhere. The God’s came to notice that this being was too perfect and too strong. Zeus decided to weaken them by sending Apollo down to cut the creatures in two, thus creating two entities – man and woman. “Man’s original body having been thus cut in two, each half yearned for the half from which it had been severed.” And so the concept of soul mates comes into existence. Plato wrote that the reason people hug, kiss and have sex with multiple people is because they are desperately trying to find their other half and to stick themselves back together, which is quite sweet in an odd way.

However I just can’t bring myself to believe in soul mates. What if you find them and they die at the age of 24? You can never love again? No. I believe in compatibility, that there can be more than one person who is absolutely perfect for you. But the thing is, slotting in with my previous theory, because of every choice you make, the chances are that the person you believe to be your soul mate has made suitable choices to get to that point when you meet too. I say suitable and not similar because what two lives are truly similar when you get down to the nitty gritty?

Everyone has the potential to be truly happy. And everyone has the potential to fall in love. And if you see what I’m saying and think “well if I’m miserable your theory is that that is inevitable because of the choices I inevitably will make, then I will always be miserable.” Don’t be silly. Maybe it was the choices you were always going to make, but when you make the choice to change something, to get out of the rut? Something that you have lead yourself into will trigger the change you yearn for.

It’s inevitable that if you want something to change, you will make it happen. And the low points will spur you forward, creating more choices.

What do you think?

Motivation

I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation recently. Motivation to do something other than nothing. I know it has a lot to do with bravery…an acceptance that sometimes you have to be vulnerable. Sometimes, you have to surrender to win the fight…if there even is a fight. It has come to my attention that the only time anything has ever happened is if I have actually gone out of my comfort zone and done something…seems obvious, no?

I am baffled when people seem so content doing nothing. Watching telly day in, day out, just because it’s easy. We are odd in that sense, that we have been soothed into such a lull in this country, that we have that seemingly eternal and ruining luxury to just do nothing. I say this…but I am just the same.

I wonder sometimes why I feel dissatisfied with nearly everything around me. It’s because we do not go through the effort of fulfilling ourselves. It’s not even a matter of potential, more just trying not to waste this preciousness that is life. We CAN’T know what comes after, or before, so I figure make the most of what we do know. And what is it that we know. It is theatre, places, books, countries, numbers, feelings, weather, nature, cities, substances, wanting, hoping, striving, people and everything in between.

Yet…and yet.

I sit here in a messy university room, in my dressing gown, not doing an essay…not doing anything.

I do theatre, I play a bit of broken music, I write. I laugh with my friends and have fun. Great but…what is this? It is what, as a member of a middle class society, I am supposed to be doing. And it makes sense in that sense. I need a degree to get a good job, to get money, to survive, to afford to die. What a shameful thing it will be to make so small an impact on the human race. I can deal with the fact that we as a species are a mere blip on Earth’s existence, but within the realms of ignorance of anything outside of what we know, I’d like to be known. To be remembered as someone who did SOMETHING beneficial. Someone who had motivation.

I don’t want children because they will tie me down, tie me to the trodden track of adult life. It’s muddy, messy. I’m itching to clamber down the track that doesn’t even exist yet…but then again, why haven’t I started? From Surrey to Kent is hardly an adventure…I have friends all over the world, from all over the world, doing what they want to do.

Yes, this piece is very I, me, I. But it applies to everyone, I think. Then again, if everyone strove to do the extraordinary, who would be the ordinary? Hmmm.

There is no conclusion to this. Only that I need to escape the lull, to decide what I want to do, where I want to go, and what I need to do to get there.

Adiemus

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