Life Versus Reality

The future.
When we are young the future holds a hypnotizing allure that locks us in. The hope of having our heart's desires granted in our lives leaves us in an elated state. So we plan, and we prepare, and we ace our tests and we are accepted into our colleges, and we get the jobs. Before we know it, we are in our "future" and then reality hits us. We are older now, wiser, but we still hold on to the faith of our future. The job we got being at minimum wage, and yet we know we can surpass this, we aim higher, to excel and be greater than we are now. Then, 15 years have come and gone. We work at minimum wage still, except now, we have two mouths to feed, a spouse to look after and hopes that we timidly poke at once in a while with a stick, just to keep us amused. The friends that we said we would never lose have come and gone and have left nothing but a knife in our back and a scar on our heart. 20 years later, we are divorced. Our children have half siblings from our spouse's mistress/master. Our job is still a constant and now we merely dream of our hopes, never touching them with our conscious mind. 30 years, and we no longer have hope to grab onto now. We only have the past. what we could have, what we should have and what we did do. Our memories now tainted with our regrets and all we have to hope for is that we have done good in the eyes of God, because our afterlife is all that we look forward to in our future.

The past.
The past can be one of two things for people; their strength, or their down fall. For some lucky few, the past gives us the strength to rise above it and build a life that would make us forget about the one we knew. Human beings are good at that. We are good at burying horrible things and acting as if we are as normal as everyone else. In group two, we have the rest of man kind. The ones that carry the weight of the world on our shoulders because of our past. The ones with "baggage" as we so fondly call it now. The ones we see in their desperate little corners in High School and in their desperate petty crimes we see on the news. Yet, strength, or weakness, we are all the same. We try to forget. Which, in the end, will be the only thing that hurts us.

The afterlife.
This is my favorite part. The debate of religion versus logic. Faith versus fact. Life versus reality. God versus Man. Or gods, if you prefer. We live in a world so full of science now that for some, an afterlife is such a ludicrous idea. However, we yearn for it. We ache for the hope that when "our time has come" we will float up to a golden gate surrounded by clouds or we are reborn. We love to fantasize about the life that will make our life meaning full. as long as we have good Karma or we were a good little kid in our life. The idea of complete nothingness terrifies us more than anything, no matter how much we cover it up with our hope. I feel it. I feel that horrible dread when I start to doubt my big puffy clouded afterlife. So.. What's the point? What is the meaning to all of this? what makes the puffy prison any better then the hell on Earth? What makes it worth while? Do you know? does anyone know? Or is there just no reason? Are we really here by ourselves, living day-today on a useless planet that just happen to hold oxygen?