“Totally!” I said. I was still in active professional journalism practice in 2001 when the boys of Osama Bin Laden crashed two jetliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Past the horrific grief and anger management that everybody went through that time, I realized one thing: the 4,000 or so victims who died in New York had PLANS—many wonderful plans for their lives they would now never realize. The terrorists brought all those plans to an abrupt stop—how dare they do that!
That’s what terrorism does to society: deprive every one of its victims the fulfillment of things they had studied for, worked hard for, saved up for, prepared for or simply hoped and aspired for in life. Then all of a sudden, in just one cruel moment of mass destruction, it’s game over for everybody.
At that time, I had been saving up money to buy my first DSLR. In fact, I had saved enough to buy one already but I always hesitated on the brink. Maybe I could use the money for something else? Is it a wise purchase?
Then I thought, suppose some wacko suddenly broke into the restaurant where I was having lunch, stripped off his jacket to reveal that he was wearing a vest of dynamites with the detonator in his trembling hands? I would never see that DSLR ever and all that working hard and saving up for it would be all for naught.
That afternoon, I bought a Nikon D90, blowing all my savings away. I still have the camera twenty years later and I lived every one of those 20 years photographing everything that moved or didn’t. My joy cannot be measured. In short, the terrorists did NOT win with me!
So go ahead, buy that expensive set of golf clubs. Otherwise, the terrorists win! Your wife wants you to buy her that 24-carat gold necklace, BUY IT, brother. Otherwise, the terrorists win. Skydiving lessons? Go for it!
There’s something liberating about this stupendous philosophy that I accidentally discovered. By and large, we live our whole lives “coloring inside the lines” and not doing anything irrational.
But try it. Do something that breaks all the boundaries of your reason and watch what happens. Let your hair down. Walk under the rain. Go up the escalator by getting on the side that goes down. Tell the guard, “Really?? No wonder it took me so long to get up here!”
Act juvenile. It’s fun, believe me.
I call it thumbing the nose of the terrorists—showing them that life in this civilized world of ours, even lived in the worst possible way, is still a million times more exciting that whatever cause they are fighting for. So they can blow themselves to smithereens all they want but so long as I’m beyond the effective destructive radius of the blast, I’m going to live my life AS A BLAST in my own free way.
I will celebrate life daily and thank God for my simplest joys, hallelujah!*
No comments:
Post a Comment