I realised how pathetic I am today. What can I do in comparison to a majority of the public? A lot, to be quite honest. I'm well educated, well traveled and I'm a very athletic person. I've had a 9-5 job; I've been face to face with the poverty and hard times that inner city kids have to deal with in America; I've dealt with the elderly knocking at death's door forgetting if they even LIKE tea, let alone whether they want it with their meal; Using hand gestures alone I've taught foreign people - who can't understand a word of English - how to safely use extreme sports equipments; I've looked after animals day in, day out as they drop dead all around you or are sold on as temporary crutches to settle an irate child.
I've been to 4 out of the 6 continents in the world; I'm not as well traveled as I'd like to be, but I've seen more than my a lot of my friends, much more than my siblings, countless times more than my parents and my grand parents can't even grasp the distances I've traveled.
I've had a "dance-off" in a hip-hop location against a black guy who's jeans were slung low and his hat turned the wrong way around and still won; I've walked through Harlem at 3am where there were no other white people around; I've been in a fight and won convincingly; I've been in a fight and lost convincingly.
I know what I've done with my life and it's not enough. Not yet. There's so much more I want to do. I've not even finished the start of living my life. But given all of this information I can still say outright, "I am pathetic."
It's not an issue of self esteem, or confidence, or a damaged ego. It's a matter of fact.
I look at my ancestors, granted I don't have vivid documents to peruse, but due to what anthropologists have told me our predecessors were:
- Clothing themselves without clothes shops, factories, sewing machines...hell, they didn't even had a thread and needle.
- Hunting and feeding themselves without farmers, abattoirs or Macdonalds.
This is just a couple of examples of the amazing things our so called "primitive" ancestors were doing...and I'm in total envy of their abilities. What happened to the natural man?
If our technology stopped working today, I'd be screwed. I don't have an ounce of survival knowledge. I wouldn't know what fungi, berries, plants are safe to eat.
And that's why I'm pathetic. I don't even know how to start - and successfully - keep a fire going. Matches, Lighters, Firelighters and all that jazz. My only job was to start a fire and keep the room warm. I don't know how many pieces of scrumpled-up paper and firelighters and matches I wasted just trying to get it going but I hit an all time low as the fire kept dying out.
How I kept it lit at the end, I have no idea, but out of respect to my ancestors and - god forbid - just in case the world ends and I have to start a fire and I have lots of scrumpled up paper, firelighters and a box of matches to hand, then I endeavour to use the internet - not for pornography or watching people hurt themselves - but to find out the basics behind lighting a fire and keeping it burning.
I'm pathetic, but at least I know it. And at least if I die because of my lack of "primitive" skills, then it'll be my own fault and not that of an ever depleting society who's inhabitants are growing more and more inept with every blog-posting, TV-watching minute that goes by.
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