History

Jim Morrison, singer of the 60’s band The Doors, put into his poetry a precise summary of a modern life: “every day is a drive thru history”. A friend asks me how I am doing and I pause a moment to reflect, “how, in fact, is my life going?”

The truth is: I find myself living a life a little lost in the half-mirrored surfaces of a world in which any one of us, swept along by the force and power of tidal currents and flows of culture and time against which we have no power and over which we have no control, while we all do what we can to stay afloat, to derive value, meaning or purpose from a strange and unknowing ocean of Other people and places in which we are immersed and with what little time any of us ever receives to try and make sense of these rules or games and strange logic or misguided constraints of a world that treats this all as quite normal when it is all really just so much contingency, randomness and blind chance that any of this should be what it currently is.

How am I doing? I am ok, just a bit sad that the world is in such a terrible state when it doesn’t really have to be.