Older, but no wiser

"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Can't you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front."

- G.K. Chesterton

Oh, to have the imagination to use such simple imagery to express something so profound.

Hat tip to whiskeyriver.

With so much potential on so many fronts for global catastrophe, doing anything other than something which just might help avert just one of the doomsday scenarios feels like fiddling whilst Rome burns.

We wring our hands helplessly, and carry on fiddling.

Work continues to be as purposeless and unfulfilling as ever. But I dutifully fiddle nonetheless. It seems the only option.

I gaze longingly at the crate of rock climbing gear in the garage and wonder if I’ll ever use it again. But anyway, it would only be fiddling.

My bass guitar looks at first sight like a metaphorical fiddle. Yet art – even apparently banal musical shows - has a way of touching the soul. So in spite of the pressure it brings to a self-doubting musician struggling to master his instrument, and the single-minded focus it requires, this is one form of fiddling of which I’m not ashamed.

I reckon kids growing up and leaving home is the biggest life transition I’ve encountered so far. Adjustment is proving surprisingly difficult, in ways I’m only just beginning to notice, let alone comprehend. This is the most real thing in my life today. In the final analysis, family trumps global catastrophe.

I might change my Internet Service Provider. It would be a worthwhile cost saving, but I'd lose the hosting service for the photos which appear on this blog, so all that would be left would be those little squares marking the place where something's missing. The blog's a mess anyway - the template was designed in the days when 800 x 600 pixel screens where commonplace. It's obvious too that I have very little to say these days; I've changed, I'm not the person I was when I began blogging. I'd delete the whole thing and forget about it, except for one thing. The comments. If I look back over old posts, it's not what I've written that matters, it's the conversations that have ensued, the connections, the friendships - although to my shame I've let those lapse. But I'm not quite ready yet to cut adrift from all that, so this broken space can stand a while longer while I figure out what to do with it.

...I should just acknowledge that I can't do this any more.

A chance snapshot in Bury St Edmunds at the weekend.

Shout these words from the Archdruid at any government you like, and you can be sure they’ll clap their hands over their ears and sing “LA, LA, LA; I CAN’T HEAR YOU” :

“The difficulty here is that faith in the prospect of a better future has been so deeply ingrained in all of us that trying to argue against it is a bit like trying to tell a medieval peasant that heaven with all its saints and angels isn’t there any more. The hope that tomorrow will be, or can be, or at the very least ought to be better than today is hardwired into the collective imagination of the modern world. Behind that faith lies the immense example of three hundred years of industrial expansion, which cashed in the cheaply accessible fraction of the Earth’s fossil fuel reserves for a brief interval of abundance so extreme that garbage collectors in today’s America have access to things that emperors could not get before the industrial revolution dawned.

“That age of extravagance has profoundly reshaped – in terms of the realities of human life before and after our age, a better word might be “distorted” – the way people nowadays think about very nearly anything you care to name. In particular, it has blinded us to the ecological realities that provide the fundamental context to our lives. It’s made nearly all of us think, for example, that unlimited exponential growth is possible, normal, and good, and so even as the disastrous consequences of unlimited exponential growth slam into our society one after another like waves hitting a sand castle, the vast majority of people nowadays still build their visions of the future on the fantasy that problems caused by growth can be solved by still more growth.”

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And if unlimited growth really isn’t possible, what then?