Ill-Fitting Choices

What does it mean that the shoes are too small for the feet? In the past, women wore shoes way too small and damaged their feet thinking small shoes are pretty. This insanity of women hurting themselves to please men with things that men don't care about. Yet men are blamed for these weird ass cultural deformities. But that is another topic.

The topic of shoes being too small can take on many meanings. When the partner you choose is a size too small, you can be vulgar and think of that one thing or you can be a bit more refined and think about the entire package that makes your partner. It can be your job, your profession, your client base, your car, your home, your everything. At some point, a caveman can only fit one leg inside his cave and is he expected to be grateful for at least having a cave? At this point, he would look for another cave unless his addiction to his comfort zone is too strong. But how can that be the case with a human that is constantly on the run for survival in a time where man was prey to many predators, humans, and beasts?

Nowadays, you can sleep with your head in the rubbish bin and call it home, and others will see it as your home, and you won't move lest someone else take your trash can. It's a sickness of the mind, this addiction to the comfort zone. If time would stand still and we wouldn't age one bit, we could waste endless time on all of this. But we do age, and time does pass, and before we know it, we have lived and died in the garbage.

So we look at the past and say we're so privileged, and we are, because we can do whatever we want to do, with little fear of being killed. Yet when that pressure is gone—and in all honesty, even in a warzone where we see life as temporary—all we end up doing is nothing. And if picking lemons in your garden and making lemon juice makes you happy, then that's not nothing. But if you're sitting in your chair depressed about all the dreams you have, then you're doing nothing. Then a sabre-tooth tiger, natural disaster, and a violent tribe of cannibals would have brought you closer to something of value, perhaps.

So we are privileged, but just like a family dog runs the risk of getting fat, the wolf howls to the moon. Instead of sailing into the wind, we fart about our homes, defeatedly wishing for more but not willing to challenge anything that surrounds us. The young rebel and turn into the old, who resent the young for blocking the roads with their protests about some new world-destroying problem—then the whales and the hole in the ozone, which nobody talks about anymore as if it's no longer an issue, and now climate change. There's constantly some event that is going to blow up our indestructible rock flying in endless expanding space. And yet for many, it would mean so little if this were to happen, for 20, 30, 40, or 50 years on this rock have yielded little to be proud of, to be satisfied with—a life of regrets. And finally, when you wake up, your walker is too slow, the battery in the wheelchair runs out too soon, and the nurses won't let you do this or that because you might hurt yourself.

We do get old, and we do die, and often before we get truly old. So when you see the shoes are too small, don't break your feet, don't cut your toes, don't force your feet in with agony. Throw these damn shoes out, throw them far, far away, into a moving garbage truck, into the river, off the mountain, burn them in the fire, but whatever you do, never put them back on again.