"If life had a direction, we would take the other."
This was said to me 10 years ago, during a late night jamming session with twin amateurs guitarists and their band. At the time, they were in the peak of their rebellious and anti-establishment selves, and they were so...right.
Multi-directional
Life is universally pictured as a thread: it starts with the umbilical cord, moving gradually to lengthen our spine, later on it follows our throat line to the intestines, and, for some, it continues its cycle through the reproduction of another umbilical cord. And so life goes on for most.
But it seems that more and more, lately, there is the realisation that we live on borrowed time. We collect as many experiences as possible, we experience as many stories as we can, we write multiple destinies for ourselves in a rush, we race through the world to create memories, we recycle these memories to educate, until we need to break the cycle and take a break. The thread might run a thousand miles long or stretch itself five yards, but it remains essentially the same.
There is clearly no thread that is more remarkable than the other: it might be made of gold, made of dreams, made of medals, made of fantasies, made of laurels, made of greenbacks, it is still a borrowed thread and there will certainly come a day for payback. Some times, we think that we can switch from one thread to another or disguise our existence into a line that, if we throw as far as possible, will hook the most hidden treasures. This illusion certainly pushes some of us beyond the boundaries of normalcy, out of the reach of understanding, into the realm of iconoclasm.
Existential questioning
There is no doubt that rebellion is necessary in our day and age. When our threads are pulled together and tied up in the hands of a few on top of a system that regulates the world like a puppet show, the no pasaran! becomes the essential ingredient, if not the reason of our lives. Hence the growing numbers of doorslams, defections, disappearances and "hermits" among the current 30-somethings.
My former twin friends would now be in their early 30s and, by now, they would have pondered the following set of Q&As.
1. Rise to management positions: what for, since I work better when I follow my own agenda?
2. Settle down and marry: what for, since the welfare state can take better care of my wife and children?
3. Save money for a retirement fund: what for, given that I can borrow money at any given time?
Life, reinvented
That is the new order of the 21st century and its enduring social-liberalism, its absence of hard-boiled heroes, its fabrication of collective dreams.
The more we attempt to own the thread that is lent to us for a certain time, the more we fail. Why follow blindly as if this was the promise made to us by Ariadne? Why keep on pulling when there is no end to the task? Really, why not walk back in the other direction? After all, what has been seen and experienced before is the guarantee of what is possible, achievable, and real.
So make no mistake: we are all bound to come back to our teenage years and the spirit of rebellion in us, one day or another. The crux of our lives lies in KNOWING when to look back, so that we have enough life and enthusiasm left in us to make the most of this time-travel venture, back to our own genesis.
