La très catastrophique visite du zoo

Joël Dicker

Description

We cannot answer when children ask us about the meaning of life as we do not have an appropriate answer that is universally acceptable, or sometimes even acceptable to ourselves. If you can take some time to meditate over this, what would your answer to life be? Is it the goal to become financially independent, to find love, become a better person (however hazy that idea is), or something for the future? Why are we inclined to think of the meaning of life as something to attain, rather than something to experience? That is if there is even a meaning at all!

In our societies, we adopt roles and take up the responsibilities of those roles because whatever we do is necessary for our society to function. Working from 9 to 5 on most days with but only a few short hours and perhaps an off-day each week for yourself, we have conditioned ourselves to work for our futures at the expense of our present. Then one day when you wake up, you realize it is too late. Most of life have passed you by as you continuously slogged for your future. When will you have time to slow down and appreciate the scent of flowers, the hue of the sky, and perhaps the breeze of the wind? When you have a million dollars in your bank? Or perhaps when you are a senior manager?

We all live with this sense of a human facade because of the way we structure our identity and it limits our connection to our environment, awareness of the universe, and thus our ability to be true to ourselves when we ask the sort of questions I have quoted above. When the priority in life is shifted to attaining goals rather than enjoying a journey, and when society dictates what is useful solely in the economic sense, we get so lost in our everyday lives as people that we forgot the purpose of life outside our everyday responsibilities.

That is the reason for this book. In it, I have detailed how we have arrived at our adoption of this facade we wear and how we might unlearn them. Through this book, I hope that you can again experience your connection with the universe as you did when you were a child, to be able to consciously detach yourself from the rat race we often find ourselves in, and to enjoy your life the way it is meant to be enjoyed, just like a dance following the most extraordinary melody played by the greatest ensemble that is life.

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