Dude, Where's Your Engine?

I have always been intrigued by tales of people who have an absolute disregard for the disconcerting prospect of death, how much ever short lived their disrespect for death is. Mind you, this doesn’t in any way refer to those sick souls with suicidal tendencies, who are driven by fear. Rather this post is about that rare breed of people who have an exactly opposite mindset. While the first lot is those being chased to death by life, the latter is those who chase after life.

When you are able to give a nasty look at death and have a good laugh at its inevitability, it just bloats up your ego so much big that you feel like God. In his final moments on the cross, Jesus was just a man when he asked “Father, why me?” But, the moment he realized “Sorry Father. You can’t be wrong”, he was one with Him.

This is all about those who have consciously tried to delete the very word “safety” from their dictionaries. I would rather say it is a deeper exploration of the theme of my previous post – travel. The most intriguing part of the story is the reason(s), if at all there is any, that drives such thirsty travelers to take the road less traveled or rather the one never traveled. If there is any such reason(s), is it worthwhile to think about it, leave alone follow it? Is it wise enough to leave the known confines of family/society for that apparent foolishness? What sets an adventurer apart from a madman? Or is it just that absolute adventure is misconstrued as mere madness? While I can’t say for sure that theirs is the best way to be/live, I certainly feel they who seek the unknown “live” more than those who settle for the comfort of the known.

What drives such souls? What makes them go after life, the search which ends not till the last breath, unlike the others who morbidly wait for Mr Yamadharmaraja to visit them? Are they pulled by the lure of the unknown rather than driven by the boredom of the known? A passable answer would be that they have got so much energy inside them that they find “the known” severely lacking to provide them with satisfying ways to expend it here and now. So the search for the alternative channels becomes inevitable for them. The hardships of the search make the explorer realize the unexplored terrains both within himself and without. The more you explore, the more you feel stronger.

How do you find your own internal engines and kick start them? Probably a bit of madness might help to prime the engine. Once it gets started, I believe it can be made to keep running with minimum effort, for it seems to be a virtuous cycle. The more you expend the energy, the more you create it inside. Yeah, I know it goes against the conventional wisdom of the law of conservation of energy. But it seems to work that way. Probably, it is not so much about the creation of energy per se. Rather, it is all about the alternative utilization of energy that might have been wasted in other boring conventional ways. (Hopefully, more on this some time later in another such long drab post.)

But, how is this very search justified? Do we really have to start our engines, if at all we are able to find them? Well, as I had said earlier in the tailpiece of this post, what we go through is more important than where we end up.

Aside
This post was inspired by the movie "Into the wild", which I am dying to see. Hope it lives up to my expectations! Please don't forget to read the synopsis at the site!