At night you are tired. Your back aches from a long days work. You get in the bed of your rented apartment and try not to let the depression hurt you too bad tonight. Just fall asleep tonight and it will be tomorrow. This dose not bring comfort though. It only reminds you of where you stand in life. Tomorrow you will go to work, bust your ass, and be the same person that you really hate.
Then it hits you that you have already hit the top of the mountain. Tomorrow will not be better, it will be worse, because you are on the downward slope now. Sometime, long ago (you dont even remember when) you were the happiest you will ever be.
Grief befalls you. You begin to think of death. It is a scared death. Some day I will not be able to work this hard anymore, you think. Then What? You have no retirement fund, no owned house. How will survival be possible without money or happiness. You can hardly get by now working your ass off. What about the future? Your body will not hold out. There are only two possibilities. 1. To depend of someone else to take care of you, you son, or if by miracle a rich wife. The son feels wrong because you are depending on him, and you force it out of your mind, or fear does. The wife quickly fades, this will not happen.Then there is 2. You die before that happens. This is the acceptable future.
As your mind centers in on this second possibility, a dark cloud forces its way through you. It is so strong that it hurts. Fear and sadness overtake you. You can feel it strongest up at your forehead. It enters your sixth chakra and seems to pull towards the back of your brain. The force of it makes your forehead feel like it will cave, or already is, caving in with energy. This energy pushes through your whole brain, filling it with sadness all the way back to where your spine meets your skull. Then it disperses into the rest of your body, but it is worst in the head. The sadness echoes in there, getting stronger, quieting down with your concentration, then bursting again with a strength that makes you want to stop fighting it off.
As you slowly accept that the fear will stay it quiets down a little and you drift off to sleep. But you know it will return tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. . This struggle will not to be devoured, the fear will continue until the day that you do die. Alone, poor, and afraid.
The End
by Jon Raby
The decision to have nothing forced me to reexamine many ideologies that I was afraid to let go of, including health insurance and retirement savings. To have either, I had to have sustainable employment. The fear of losing this safety net was great. This fear adversely affected my health and lessened my excitement for growing old at all. It was keeping me from doing what I love.
A year before I set out walking, I canceled my health insurance policy. On that day I became 100 percent responsible for anything that happened to me. The moment I claimed this responsibility, I began to see danger or potential problems before they occurred. In the four years since then, I have had only a few aliments, and those were healed through my own resolve. Many people tell me that with my erratic diet, I am not taking care of my body. I have to disagree with them, and have only my own health and wealth of energy to prove it.
I had worked for ten years. During that time I put money into IRAS for my retirement. Now, as I planned to leave all that I knew, I was faced with the choice of not planning for my financial future at all. I considered this decision for some time.
Ultimately I've found that the less I concern myself with my future, the more the future takes care of itself. The less attention I give to fears of gowing old, the more my mind opens, and the more value I am to others.
It seems to me that enjoying oneself completely, to the degree that others also share a true sense of joy, is the best retirement plan. It is also the best insurance against becoming isolated or a burden upon others in old age. To put off being dedicated to one's heart and mind until later is a sure way to need a great deal of retirement benefits and insurance.
by Jeffrey Sawyer
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