Solitude.

A Work of Fiction,

I was watching an old Twilight Zone episode, the one with the book-loving banker. 'Henry Bemis,' was his name. One day, while trying to read between customers at the teller booth, he was caught, and soon after, chastised by his boss for reading at work. Poor guy couldn't catch a break. He explained to his boss that he loved to read but when he got home his wife would hide his books, tear up his magazines, and make it impossible. His boss only laughed and canonized her.



One fateful day he takes his little brown sack lunch, a couple of hardbacks, and heads down to the vault to catch up on his reading. During this fateful visit we are shown a newspaper that talks about the capable destruction of the a-bomb. During his devotional reading, the walls and the earth shake, his watch glass shatters and a book is thrust violently open. When he finally makes it out on top of the shattered remains of this bank, he sees a mutilated town with rubble everywhere.

His first day he spends confused on what to do, stumbling around in a daze, so he retires to a well placed couch on the street. In the next days he comes across a pistol, begging for forgiveness, he contemplates suicide. Does he want to be alive?
But in the next few hours, searching for more answers, he stumbles across the public library, with slews of books intact. So he lays out books for days ahead, and months on, stacks and stacks of them. As he walks down the library steps, he comes across the clock. He sighs in relief, 'Solitude. I've never had it. But now I have as much time as I'll never need.' He hugs the clock and as he does so his glasses fall off, and they shatter on the steps below. As he clutches for them, he puts them on and realizes his desperate situation: his only salvation, near-eternal solitude with a colossal selection of books at hand, and no way to read them.

He realized that the choices he had made to appease others, would now affect him for the rest of his doomed life. His most favorite hobby, books, literally surrounding him, in a wasteland where he had nothing but time to enjoy them.
My, what a terrible situation. How many of us are in that same similar situation to the banker? Do we put off the small little things we enjoy because people say we shouldn't? Or because we're told not to? I want you to ask yourself; Do I do things because I enjoy them, or do I do them because it satisfies others and not myself?

There can be a happy medium between helping others and yourself, obviously. But there is also a point where you are giving and not receiving. Figure out where you are in that situation. Then conquer.

--Hook