| Some Words |
| Every once in while i experience that most frightening of human experiences - a moment of clarity. For those not familiar with the phrase a moment of clarity - well done, life has been good; now read on. A moment of clarity is best described as the occasion when as a child you have the sudden and horrible realisation that you and your parents are all going to die - and your parents have no power at all to change that reality. Its scary. Its a cliff-face. Although extremely nagative experiences, moments of clarity offer us as humans a fleeting glance at cold, hard reality and remind us of that even in the midst of others we are all, essentially, alone.We come in to this world on our own and we leave on our own (no emails from twins and triplets thanks). If you have made it this far into the text, well done, i nearly left myself. These moments of clarity are not nice, we need to get moving again, fill our time with activity to quieten the mind, extinguish what we can comfortably dismiss as 'negativity'. A common recurring moment of clarity, call it a day-mare if you wish, is the entirely unwelcome realisation that the vast majority of your time is spent doing things that you dont want to do. Consider the world of work. We seem to convince ourselves that because we are exploiting ourselves then that is acceptible. Because we have trained our minds to believe that we are actually getting more than we put in, we can just about get through it. At this point you may be rationalising your own personal situation with a few 'well my job is not so bad' and 'i get pretty well paid'. If you are doing this then well done, you have developed the higher-level human skill of self hypnosis. Keep telling yourself in a kind of mantra that things are not so bad, things will change, you have no choice, it wont happen again. Maybe you should consider the significance of how much time you spend thinking and planning your next holiday. It would be great if we could all stop living in the future and stop rearranging the present in our 'to do' piles, stop reading newspapers, listening to the news and redisover the ancient human experience of (self) exploration. Lets block out all the input we receive that tells us what to see, hear and feel and charts the human experience so thoroughly that its hardly worth bothering ourselves. I cannot express enough the importance of getting to know and to like yourself. Although this text may have come across as the negative monologue of an unhappy, single, cynical and spiritually devoid individual, i am in fact none of those things. I am not a student. I am not an idealist. I am not an evironmentalist. I am not a fundalmentalist. I am the same as you, a fully fledged, tax paying and law abiding minority group of one. I must now return to the throng both physically and theoretically, time to return to not having enough time. I urge all people to embrace inertia, to make the time to sit and be still, to be good to yourself, and above all, to think. Thankyou kindly for some of your time Ben Greenwood |