Another Day In (Not) Paradise

So, here I sit, once again, in the hallways of my school. Bored, tired, and ready to go again. Nothing much happens here, just classes where they attempt to teach you things they think you don't know, or you already do but yet, you need to be retrained. I can't say that I don't appreciate what goes on here, I do. Just sometimes, I swear we are dumb ourselves down to be made smart again. Knowledge is supposedly power, but whose power is it? Is the the one gaining or the one giving? Sometimes I wonder if we are getting the truth as it is, or as it is wanting to be. Power is the key word in that last sentence, as if you didn't know. Well, now that rant is over..onto the topic for this post.
Contrary to popular belief this, not everyone sees things the same way. To exercise this point, I ask you, what defines paradise? A beach in Hawaii maybe, some mountain view in Aspen, a crystal lake minus the dude with the chainsaw and hockey mask? Is it a place or simply as state of mind? I think it can be both and it can be neither one. It is what you make it. Everyone defines their life in their own way. But, given the current state of the world and those who live in it, that is not entirely true.
Life has become a spectators sport, only we forget we are playing. We are called off the bench of certain moments and expected to play in a game we have been all but absent from. We claim to have been there, watching, cheering, waiting to be played, but yet, we are all but clueless when given the chance. We are refugees, we are prisoners to things beyond control and meaning. But yet, we are expected to play like we are going for the win in some all important tournament...life.
You see, the way I see it..if we are all playing a game, the same game, but different, why are we all expected to yield the same result? What I do, how I play, and even the times I refuse to shouldn't be dictated by someone else playing their version. Should we or should we not be able to decide what we will and will not do to get ahead?
Everyone has a drive...something that makes them want to do better, run faster, make more money, beat an aggressor, change or stay the same. But, how do we know what makes us do or not do those things? Can you wake up in the morning and know what battles you are going to fight that day? I don't think you can. Things happen, nothing to completely concrete, except of course concrete. Things happen above and beyond our control on a daily basis. But they don't always happen to us. They happen to other people, some we may know and others, we have never heard of them...ever.
Everything we do, has some adverse affect. It is constant, but it is changing. Every second is not counted for, until you make it whatever it is. In the minutes that I have spent writing this, I didn't know every word, every puncuation mark, every thought until I wrote it. I knew what I wanted to convey, but not how I planned on doing it. But here it is, written, albeit, not perfectly, but written in the way that I wanted it to be. In a famous song by The Eagles a line is sung that says "Call someplace paradise....kiss it goodbye." Once you claim to have found what you want, you realize it isn't. Paradise doesn't exist, not the way you think. it is what it is, it is what you make it. What you decide is what you are going to get.....Like the song says...