Dreams, Hope, Freedom, Choices...

Whether one is in a pro-democratic country, or a nationalist/dictatorship country, one doesn't have much choices, if any. Even one who is living in the wild, free of any political obligations, free of any troubles, he is not free. Let me put it this way, there is no real freedom in this world, no matter where you are. Great philosophers like Parmenides and Plato argued that things of this world, the world in which we perceive with our senses is illusionary, thus the world is really illusionary and nonexistant.

Thus, if the world itself is illusionary, that includes, nature, the Earth, the animals, the trees, ourselves, and not to mention freedom. Let me put it another way, if someone were to be deaf, dumb, and blind, and lacks the sense of touch, one can't see, hear, smell, talk, or feel, he is as good as dead at best. Without all these senses, he would have no world to speak or think of. A blind man would have a world without light, to a deaf, a world without sound... Everyone perceives the world differently from every individual because the world that revolves around every individual is different, the world that shapes a person is different from the way it shapes another. Ponder on this.

Philosophies aside. Allow me to begin with a question. How free are we? Are we free to kill? Are we free to lie? Are we free to sleep with anyone we like? Are we really free to make our choices, any choice? Yes, actually. Sounds contradictory? Read on.

I say we are free to kill, simply because we can. The next second, I could always take the kitchen knife and plunge that into the chest of someone walking past me. So that proves it, we are free to do whatever we want. Earlier, I said freedom is illusionary, effectively saying that freedom does not exist, which is true. It is the consequences we have to face for the decisions that we make. Suppose I take the knife and plunge it into someone, the next minutes would see the police coming after me and put me down. Suppose I were to walk into a club and put my hand against a woman's privies, the next minute, I would be "bottled" by her sisters and friends.

Every choice we make comes with a consequence, but I'm not going to raise infinite examples to prove my point. Instead, we shape our choices according to the world around us, contemplating on the consequences...and found ourselves not having a choice afterall. There is one saying that we do not always marry the person we love most, it is because of our circumstances that we have to make difficult choices most of the times.

Yet we still have our dreams, to do what we'd hope to do, be the person we want to be...can we really do that? We are entitled to our own dreams, hopes and fantasies, is it however, necessary since the world rarely turn out to be the way we want it to be? Should we still have dreams and be optimistic about the future? Should we still have dreams when we find ourselves in a position that is already good enough? Say, a guy and a girl loves each other, but the guy has a chronic illness, the girl doesn't know how to prove her love...should they be together? Or would they be better off finding someone new? We'd never know.

I feel that, while we can't really choose our own future, we can choose the consequences, by making our decisions so that the consequences become more or less bearable for us and the people around us. But...do we really think this far??