10/9/12

Right then. Don't really know where to start.  This is either going to turn into a wonderful, fluffy, metaphorical post of wisdom.  Or it'll go no where.  Place your bets now!

So, I'm going for a walk down a quiet path, nothing to hear but the wind in the trees and the crickets in the grass.  The sky's getting a bit stormy looking though, and the air is swirling about.  Perhaps I don't want to be here any more.

But how much of this is real?  We probably have to assume the "physical" things are just that.  The ground I'm walking on has got to be pretty solid (apart from all the nothingness in the atoms etc. but that's another road I'm not going down now...), and the wind, well I can feel that on my face, see it rippling my clothes so that must be real too.

So now take a leap.  We all have aspirations right?  Where do they come from? What are they based on?  An aspiration doesn't exist as a "thing", it's not tangible, but I want to follow it anyway, that's where I want to be.  You could describe it as something at the end of the path, walk for long enough and you'll get there.  But I can't see this path, or it's end, so who's to say our feet are treading in the right place?  And that we're not getting lost in the undergrowth instead...

I know my aspirations have changed, and if I track them over the years I can see that they've changed in line with my surroundings. Does that mean the paths we're following aren't our true aspirations, and the real goal is hidden somewhere? 

What about pain?  No one likes pain.  A broken bone, a foot after standing on lego, a cut hand.  Never pleasant.  But that's the idea. I've always been told that pain is the way our body looks after itself - a warning that something is damaged, or a way of learning not to do that again.  But how much of the pain we feel is really physical?  Sure it all comes down to nerve impulses and chemical transmitters so something is physically happening. But these things fire for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes that reason is hard to find.  What if that sensation of pain isn't real, and it's all in your head?  You could chase a solution for years and never find one because there isn't a problem to fix.

So what's the answer to all this I hear you ask? No idea.  If you work it out, let me know!

I seem to have reached the end of this, I'll let you decide which of the earlier categories this falls into...