Human Racing

There’s a time in everyone’s life where you just have to stop and think ’stuff it’. When you’ve tried every possible thing but it still doesn’t work; where hotlines and helpcentres consistently fail; where your friends can only scratch their heads and say ’sorry mate, you’re on your own.’ It’s hard to admit you’ve failed. We are built to despise losing and we are taught that winning is everything. From the dawn of man the winner is the one who brings the most meat in from the hunt, or who brings the most revenue in for him and his own. The loser is stuck licking moss off damp rocks, or working a dead-end shift as a cashier for a local supermarket. The winners win; the losers lose.

But what about the ones who are in the middle? The ones who neither win nor lose, but instead take a different approach to life, a different route of personal success? They are the Zen buddhist monks meditating to achieve enlightenment in a remote monastery in the Tibetan mountains. They are the addicts who have managed to veer back onto the correct course of life according to them; having overcome their vices they are back in the race but far behind the rest of the pack. They are hippies living in their VW combi plastered with psychedelic colours that would make the colourblind vomit. Losers by everyone else’s standards except their own.

So what does it mean to win, then? Do we have set goals that we must achieve in order to obtain ‘winner’ status? By that regard, do we have to meet certain criteria in order to be losers? Millionaires, presidents, kings, queens, moguls, tycoons, entrepreneurs, geniuses, physicists, scientists; are they winners? Sure, they have accomplished great things (most of them, anyway) but are they winners? What about the bums? The homeless, the dejected, downtrodden and hopeless? The addicts, crooks, murderers and thieves; the suicidal, the shift slaves, the cubicle dwellers; are they losers?

Is there even a race?

Of course there is; the Human race. From the moment we’re born, we’re racing. Racing to the end, to the finish line. But here’s the kicker; we’re all running at the same pace. Yep, every one of us. Not a single man, woman or child can run faster or slower than anyone else. So if we’re all running at the same speed, how can some of us be winners, and some losers? Simple; we can’t. We’re all losers, every one of us. The only thing we’re racing against is death, and I think we all know how that race will end up. So if death catches us all, then going by the rules of a race, we must all be losers. Logical.

So stop racing against death. You can’t win, and if you try you’ll be a loser. Embrace death. It’s inevitable. We can’t beat it. The only thing we can do is race against the time we have left. Most people have got it all wrong. They say they’re trying to ‘live life to its fullest’ and all that, but that’s just another form of death racing. There will always be something you haven’t tried, something you haven’t seen, or even heard of. Instead, people should say they’re trying to ‘live life to its best’. Stop and smell the roses, it’s about the journey, not the destination; and so on. Do be a good person. Do be the best you can. Do be all you can be, which is anything you want to be. Do live how you want to live, not how they say. Do live.

Do live life. Don’t race.