The thoughts of the people who build websites, write books, compose music, draw, work in science labs and classrooms, develop empirical organisations or just build houses out of used up motor car tyres. Your ideas and actions make you special. You have that ability to put things together, to juxtapose, to compose and create something. Do you ever stop to think what type of people do that? Is that a normal thing to do? Are you troubled? Perhaps it’s just that the uncertainty of it all that’s about you that’sjust getting to you. That feeling, that sure and resonant feeling that those who develop and cling onto high principles or absolute views, the seekers of truth and light are the most deluded of all human kind. It’s sad really. For them everything needs an explanation, then it can be described, catalogued and packaged and then because of the process it can be believed in and, in worst cases shared and pursued. In the scheme of things all that is quite unnecessary and wasteful. Scribbles on paper, pixels on screens, sound and fury, whispers carried away by a toxic breeze.
Somehow we never quite learn from history. At an early age everybody should be made to read a series of biographies, look at them candidly, take in a wholerandom life laid out and described, what did it amount to? School kids should visit graveyards and attend funerals, listen to eulogies and read obituaries and then discuss the choices those folks did or didn’t make and maybe learn something. Was the person happy and what did they achieve? How can we break this pointless cycle of repetition? Am I a passenger here or am I driving something? Of course if somebody happens to have invented or developed the wheel or the iPhone; carried out open heart surgery or built atomic weapons they may feel that their contribution was worthwhile – quite rightly. There’s a measure to be made and recorded. But what of a Sun journalist, a checkout assistant in Morrison’s, a Ryanair pilot, a vagrant, a soap star or a philosopher? In the end there is no value judgement to make, we do what we do and we are all equally fulfilled and unfulfilled. We just pass the time the best way we can.
It may be that all life is a bit part in some David Lynch film, walking on and off screen in the background, unnoticed by a daydreaming audience, disguised by our own indifference and anonymity; Mulholland Drive – “a load of moronic and incoherent rubbish” according to one critic. If you find any of these things troublesome then try sitting still and dosing yourself with a mug of mushroom soup.
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