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TWENTYSOMETHING by Ishi Dinim
Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbour. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What I'm interested in right now isn't personal growth. I understand how to benefit myself; like many people, I spend most of my time doing just that. I feel isolated. I know I'm loved and all, by friends and family, but there's something missing. What I want more than anything else is to help someone, to have what I do matter to them. They don't have to know that I had a hand in it; I don't need the recognition. More than guilt or altruism motivating this, I just want to balance out how much I consume with some sort of benefits-sharing program (uh, that sounds like economic speak). I want to feel connected, but in an unusual way. I'm willing to have a lot less, but, so they get more?
We must move forward. News alert folks: people are dying all around the world. They're dying to make our lives better, and they might kill to have what we have. We must keep the poor, huddling masses off our doorsteps. Let them come along at their own speed. The devil is in the details, but so is God, I guess.
I look out at the world, a curious child yearning to experience the mysteries that life has to share. I tuck my head between my knees to hide from all its ugliness. I vacillate between wonder and horror, a thirst for knowledge and a wish for ignorance. I want to know the conditions that created my food, but do I want to know the same about my car and my shoes? I seek out the truth and do nothing with it. There is no time to act on it in an 80-hour workweek.
Who am I? So much of what I do is put into a job. It gets really hard to separate my identity from my actions. I spend so much time working, or recovering from the work, that my personal time gets ground into a thin sliver. I often hear people talk about waking up into a life they never planned. This is true for the factory garment worker at 17 cents an hour, the fruit picker on piecework, the dirt-covered miner, and me. We never planned to get stuck like this. The not so funny thing is there're probably millions of people wishing they could be stuck like me.
This glass of water sure tastes great. I wish I could send them over some; there must be a way.
Ishi graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2001, with a BFA major in photography. He makes films, collects cacti, and ponders many things. Currently he is trying to figure out what to do with the rest his life. contactishi@yahoo.ca Waiting to hear echoes back.
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