Ultimate choices

Back home I’m guided by my desires. I’m not proud of it or particularly think it’s the right way to live. Guess it just happened. If I feel like having chocolate, I go and buy some. If this book doesn’t interest me, there are thousands more at the library. Music, clothes, make-up, spare time activities are all a chain of feel-like-doing-it-this-ways.

This habit is there because of the numerous possibilities we’re surrounded by. It is so easy to get adjusted to it and end up thinking this is the only way to live. When there are so many alternatives where to pick one’s favourite it is also fairly easy to change one’s mind. Heck, if it ain’t good enough maybe the next one is. I’d say this is one of the reasons good old commitment to just about anything has become old-fashioned.

Once again I’ve been taught by movies.  (Guess I haven’t had the time to read books. )This time Mr. Nobody – a wonderful flick where making a decision is shown as a path paved with limitation and oppression of the individual. It was unsettling to recognize my own way of thinking while watching it.

But now I’m under the African sun and here life is oh so different. I’m down shifting though back home I was laughing at the very notion. If I want milk there’s only one kind – if any and I need to buy it before 6 pm from the nearby shop. In various level my life is now limited to one or only a few alternatives and I’m loving it.

This may sound like silly views of a posh westerner and in a way they are. But the pace of life here though being hard is more human in some sense. My palpitations are gone and at night I sleep like a baby despite the army of crickets and bats screaming behind my window.

I’m not deep enough to the local culture to say whether or not the viewpoint to decisions and commitment to them has shifted to the direction as back home.  It probably has a little or very soon will. After all it’s a small world we’re living in.