I Never Saw a Giraffe in My Life

Among all the endless possibilities that life presents us, there are so many that I haven’t yet done. I haven’t skydived. I haven’t travelled the world. I haven’t seen a giraffe. Despite all the essays I have written about love, I haven’t fallen in love.

These don’t belong on a bucket list, and isn’t even that introduced to us way too early?

‘The list of things you want to do before you die.’

The question isn’t what we want to do before we die, but why we feel compelled to plan it all.

Today I realised how little room I had made for accepting my life the way it is. Surrounding myself with ‘musts,’ ‘needs,’ and ‘shoulds,’ so blindly that somewhere along the way, I lost sight of the point of it all by prisoning myself in my belief system.

In a world of endless expectations, it’s easy to mistake pressure for purpose.

When you look at it from a collective perspective, humans are living freely. Not entirely, but partly. Within the structured expectations that society places on us, we still ask for more ways to limit our freedom. How? By forcing ourselves to follow the very rules that our so-called identity has imposed.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said:
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Society no longer needs to restrain us; we’ve learned to do it ourselves.

We polish our chains, and call them identity, ambition, and morality.