When I take time out of my life to randomly go to dry, middle-of-nowhere desserts and climb steep rocks (which is very frequent, let me tell you), I make it a personal rule not to stop on hills. Why? Because if I do that means I can be attacked by anything that flies. Meat-eating birds? I think not. So, actually I do tend to stay on hills seeing as I have the perfect, dominant view of anything and everything. All the more protective and efficient, no?
But seeing as this is my own (I like to think, clever) logic, why is it that the father says that people don’t like to stop on hills, ergo their (he and his son) stopping to take shelter on one. I see the fact that it’s smart to go somewhere where the average cannibal, psycho humans (which in this case is the whole population) like to accommodate themselves. But I would just love to know why these people don’t stop to rest at hills. Maybe hills are a new perspective, a new height, which they can’t fathom. Or maybe they’re just so up high that the pressure of the atmosphere affects people’s sinuses and causes unimaginable pain. And that’s why they don’t care for staying there. Or not.
But apparently not everyone harbours the same feelings towards hills. Because that is where they meet this old man who just happens to think they are going to go all Robin-hood/raving-hyenas on him. Basically, he’s peaceful. The son begs his father to help him and give him some food, and during that process, the old man says something I just can’t get off my mind. He starts out by saying that he knew this (the apocalypses) was going to happen, and when asked if he tried getting ready for it, he said, “I don’t know. People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.”
It’s true. We spend so much time thinking of the future, or doing specific things, not for the enjoyment of it, but because they go towards affecting our possible future. Which reminds me of a quote I came upon one day when reading Looking For Alaska by John Green that says that “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” And it’s true. We spend so much time focused on planning/controlling our future that we barely pay attention to the present which is the one we do happen to have control of. And in this case, I guess it would have been very helpful for the old man to have gotten mentally as well as materialistically prepared for this suffering, but then life would be about living for the future. But once the future keeps passing by and you keep on working towards that perfect future, there will come a time where you won’t have a future. You’ll die and you still won’t have appreciated the present.
All because you were too busy planning the future that you never got around to enjoying it.
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