Living As It Happens

In my dream, there was this man who kept telling me, “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” He had a big hat and a shaggy beard, but was so tall that the clouds covered his face. He kept telling that to me and I responded without me wanting to respond. My words came out of my mouth without my voice control, they just sang their way to his ears. I thought I was being unintelligent by saying these words that lacked coherence, but to my surprise, he loved them. “Wonderful words continue like this and life will go well to you, my dear boy.” How could these be wonderful words? I never thought of them, they just came out of my mouth, without my will.

Then another voice captured my attention. It was an older man, I guessed, but it was indeed a wise voice I heard. This man was shorter but was so old I couldn’t recognize. Maybe he wasn’t from my time, or from the times I use to know about. He wore a long white dress that covered much of his body, bald head, and a longer beard than the man I’d heard before. He had a white beard, wise words, and prolonged thoughts (that’s for sure). He told me, “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well” (8). His words were different to those of the tall man, but I found certain similarity in their meaning. Both were referring to life itself, and how it’s better to live it without having control over it. It reminded me of a friend of mine, Billy Pilgrim, who had no self-control over the life he lived. He always told me about some aliens he met that always told him that humans shouldn’t have free will, because we live a life of predestined events.

Then a third voice appeared out of the blue. He told me, “Happiness is not to do what we love, but to love what we do.” That was the phrase I mostly identified with. Many times it has happened that I only find happiness in the things I love to do. But if I were really to be happy, I should love the things I do. I asked him, “How can I love the things I do?” He didn’t respond. He wasn’t there. Maybe I knew the answer to this question. In the end, I should let things happen the way they’re happening. Maybe God has already written a destiny for me. Or as my friend Billy thought that we are all machines who just live the moment without a reason, without a why. I was living this moment without an explicit reason of why it was happening. It just happened. As I started questioning my reason of being here I saw the dead corpses of the people who had talked to me. That high man whose face was covered by clouds was Abraham Lincoln, the other one was Epictetus, and this last one was Jean Paul Sartre. All gone and dead, but at the same time, living and talking to me.