An Unanswerable Question Realized

When does life happen? Seems like a silly question to me, but it's one that plagues my boredom with incessant doubts that retail exists outside life. Maybe it's the persistence of emptiness from minute to minute which shelters the sight into prescribed experiences: I know I'm alive, I breathe, hear and see, I speak to customers with as much enthusiasm and care as my own friends, and I move about in search for something to do.

Unconditionally, however, this is not where life happens for me because I merely use the solitary moments for remembering, predicting, and planning activities beyond the parameters of work. Furthermore, when I'm away from work it's the last thing to come into memory as significant to who I am. If I think objectively, perhaps this is true of every event in life: the memory is present only when accessed from the intricate and complicated synapses in our brains; and if this is accurate then any moment can be integral to life. Why not then make every moment part of the answer?

The answer seems simple enough. I don't want my life defined by current environments because this influence forces life to occur in a field, currently, encouraging humanity to sidestep the important meanings of life. It deters and detracts what I know to be true and substantial. Materialism, though once a heavy influence in my desires, is seen as a black hole sucking reality from moments and replacing it with an indistinguishable fantasy of pleasure and success. If these are what are sought as benchmarks for life happening, then my pleasures and successes are measured by my achievements, my loves, my spirituality, and ultimately my happiness, not by what I own and call my own. Yes, it's true I'll call these 'things' my own, but they are intangible and unable to be stolen.

So then life must happen in memories; and therefore in moments willing to be committed to memory? I believe this only happens when I'm working with my pleasures and successes, therefore not by simply breathing, hearing, speaking, seeing, moving, etc. On a side note, this may be why I have such a hard time remembering new people's names: they haven't been placed into an aforementioned category of important life benchmarks. Do I want every moment to be a part of when life happens? No, not necessarily. This is a choice I willingly make, I suppose, and therefore affect the course which my life will inevitably go.

I acknowledge each moment is inherently beautiful and holds its own special lessons. I also acknowledge foregoing the constant adherence to accepting every moment as life might miss certain lessons. However, I adamantly believe that lessons presented for me will make themselves known for assimilation. My last acknowledgment I care to make at this time is that I am alive, here and now, and this truth does not mean every instance is permanent in the structure of my life happening. Work in the retail industry is not my life because it's not what I've come here to do. It is but a stepping stone whose lesson was learned years ago.