“A series of rooms and who we get stuck in the room with adds up to what life is.”
This is a dialogue from House MD. I don’t know if life has a definition but if it did this would be a pretty good one.
If you think about it, it does make a lot of sense. It all begins with the moment you are born, in a hospital room stuck with all unknowns, every sensation new to you. The fear, the panic and the anxiety of not knowing anything and at the same time the curiosity, the courage to know everything. The next significant room would be your first classroom. Among a plethora of strangers, each one looking at you the same way you're looking at them. And then there are the few lucky ones who get to be in the same room as someone they know. And this changes with each passing year, with the cast of this surreal movie called life mostly rotating. Oh, how we wish to go back to those rooms and get stuck with the same people again. For a select few, there’s a special room that goes onto this list - their hostel rooms. Depending upon when that transition happens, the difficulty of it varies. There are a lot more rooms that we go through until we reach that final 6*6 feet one; the one room to culminate them all.
It’s not the first time this analogy has been used to describe life. Even Shakespeare used a similar definition in As You Like It (read All the World’s a Stage). He explains how we as the mortal humans that we are, go through 7 stages in life which can be thought of to be the different rooms that we find ourselves in. But he mentions nothing about other humans. Which makes us wonder, the people in the room with us, do they matter? Well apparently just because I think that’s a pretty good definition of life doesn’t mean that I am picky about the people I associate with. To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter who’s in the room, but it does matter when it comes to how I act in that room. This is precisely why the word 'stuck' is apt. The presence of different people opens up different choices, forces you to move in different ways.
According to you, life may or may not have a definition, but the above mentioned indeed happens to us all. In the end, it boils down to your choice; you decide to what extent you’re going to take it to heart and base your decisions upon the people in the room you’re in.
