Would you rather...

I would rather die young than be an old average Joe. We only get one life, so I want to make the most of it. If I lived to be one hundred but didn't make a difference in the world that was big enough for people to remeber for a thousand years than I feel I would have wasted my life. If I died in five to ten years but had done something magnificent then I think my life would be complete. When someone accomplishes something important to them I often hear them say, "now I can die happy." I want to die happy.

What ever happens to baby horses?

When I was little my favorite book was called "What ever happens to baby horses?"
Every page would show a different baby horse coming from a different background. Some were born on farms, some in the circus, etc. Then at the end of the book it would show each of them as an adult horse performing their "profession." The circus baby would be in the circus, the farm baby would be doing manual labor, etc. The last page of the book was a shaggy draft horse as a baby growing up in a barn with a bunch of kids. He was my favorite. One horse was an Appaloosa and so it had spots on it. When I could barely talk I would point at it and say "cow." My dad would always correct me and say "no, its a horse that looks like a cow." So as I got older (and continued reading it every night) I would say, "looks like a cow!" It was my favorite book and I looked at it every night for years. Now I can compare it to humans and see how metaphorically it could be saying that people don't change. You're destined to end up like your parents. Where you come from stays with you.

Siddhartha

What I got from this passage is that the world doesn't come in black and white. Siddhartha goes on to say that there is no purely evil or purely saintly person in this world. In the book Sophies World by Josaline Gardner it is said: "It is impossible to think about death without realizing how wonderful it is to be alive." In a sense, the opposite of everything is what makes that thing hold true. If there were no evil there would be no such thing as good.
I think Siddhartha is referring to the way that we percieve time. In the western world we see time in a linear sense, but Siddhartha is saying that time is not linear. Time is an illusion that is not there at all. When a baby is born it is already determined that he will grow old so really he is not only a baby. We know as surely as if the baby were already an old man that one day he will be one. When somebody does something wrong, because it will be forgivven it is already so. We know the sun will rise-so it already has. This is a completely different way of thinking about time. It is hard for westerners to view life like this because we rely so much on our 24 hours in a day schedule. We manage our lives around time and in some ways measure our lives worth with it. To the western world, there is only such thing as black and white, good and bad, the future and the past.