Central Intelligence

General Bane is a fictional character who is in charge of a human body. He is the person whose controlling the kind of autopilot decisions in our minds. He likes working the night shift, because that is when the body is supposed to sleep, and he enjoys an uneventful shift.

Something goes wrong, as the body wakes up and goes to the kitchen for a snack. The body gets distracted and nearly falls, waking up the other senses, like pain. The General tries to employ emergency safety personnel to make the human's trip go unnoticed as ordered by his superiors, the lucid mind, but gets overruled. He needs to make due with what he's got.

Theme of the story

Think star ship enterprise, but instead of a space ship, the General needs to navigate a body which makes most of the decisions without informing him. The General is held liable for everything that goes wrong, and gets ignored when asking for help. He feels undermined and that the superiors are cruel to him. Life is like that. We think we're supposed to be in control of everything happening around us. We're frustrated when unforeseen mishaps ruin the comfort of our planned lives.

Like the General, we secretly had an unspoken urge to have an adventure, which is why he joined the army, but over time, after many disappointments, we just want to exist unnoticed. We feel that we don't matter, but that the world can't survive without our meagre existence. We need to show up and do our part. It is expected of us and we shouldn't complain.

Most of life's directional determining factors are external. Some people might call it luck, others call it faith. We can equip ourselves with the tools we need to have a happy life, but if our joy is determined by external and uncontrollable factors, our happiness will be in the hands of others.

What I've learned, but struggle with

True happiness comes from being happy with one self. Achieve or journey towards who you want to be, and not compare yourself to others who seem happy. Everyone has their challenges, but because we only mention our good times in conversation, everyone are under the illusion that they're the only ones struggling.

Being in control of life is an illusion. Being happy with one's self should be a goal and I believe that taking a journey through life by interacting with it as who we are will become fulfilling.

If you like to read the story, you are welcome to buy the book from our store page. It is available in eBook format at Smashwords, Amazon Kindle, as well as in a Print on demand paperback format at Amazon Paperback. In South Africa, I recommend buying from Takealot.