I was thinking as I was walking home after having an unhealthy dinner (this seems just so usual to me nowadays in Malaysia, so much of the food here falls into the "Eat less and only once in a while" category): "It seems that in my life I've been hopping from quest to quest very often. Is this the way to go? Should our lives ideally be a quest for something? Is there a big main quest that we should all be questing for? If it was, what would this main quest be? Should we be questing at all in the first place?"
Quests are what give us a purpose, an aim in life. Quests can be anything, from working hard and scoring all 'A's to getting a car to learning Japanese, being more friendly, anything. Without these so called quests we don't seem to have an aim in living and it'll be easy for us to rot our minds, bodies and lives away. Yet, I somehow get this nagging feeling that questing is also not really the way to go. Perhaps it's because I haven't found a quest big enough to be called the "main quest" in my life yet. It's just a nagging feeling. Perhaps the crux of my problem with it lay in what happens after you finish the quest.
There are so many quests and side quests in life just like an RPG. This might be the reason why RPGs such as Final Fantasy have been such hits with people all over the world. What happens in these games is that there is a person on a quest, a main quest. And along the way, he/she finds other friends that would help him with the quest as they go deeper and deeper into it. They also have many side quests that are sometimes aren't really related to the main quest, but what they get out of it helps them in their main quest. Finally, after all that they meet the final boss and then when they defeat him, there's usually a cool ending sequence and then the game ends in a state of happily ever after.
In real life, at the end of our quest, we don't really get this ending sequence and surprize surprize, we don't really live happily ever after after that. Life just continues on like that and everything seems to be just the same. In the end perhaps we have gained something that was unneccessary. We still feel empty. The game still goes on. Your prize and your quest was a red herring to what the real quest was.
There are so many with such red herring quests I feel. They want a car, or a better car, a bigger house, a more muscular body, firmer tits, less wrinkly faces the list goes on endlessly. After you get these things, you feel perhaps good for a while because of the good feeling of achievement, but it fades away soon and then you're back to square one, feeling as dissatisfied as you were before. The ends do not justify the means at all. If you realise that questing and finally achieving these things really don't give you anything significant in the end, you'd be achieving more than anyone of these things can give you. Isn't it simple? Simply realisation? Unfortunately life's not that easy.
I have digressed.
So what is the main quest? You think? I think that if we find the answer to this question, we'll suddenly experience a very blissful understanding of the entire working of the entire world and living will finally have a real true meaning.
It's very hard to think of the answer that encompasses everything. But truely and surely the answer has to encompass everything for it to be the MAIN quest. I would love to talk about this.
I yearn to love all of life. So far, I haven't ever even been close.
SengChye.
