Life and Lessons.

When I was writing my novel, Annie said to me: ‘Life is all about learning lessons, Brendan.’ I’d like to discuss it further with her, only she doesn’t seem to be around at the moment.

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The thing is this: The winds of fortune have been blowing from a troublesome direction for the past couple of years. They’ve been all about breakdowns, malfunctions, invasions, and seeing people whose presence I valued disappearing down unfamiliar roads, or at least retiring to a distance at which they became untouchable. When the last of those was most evident about eighteen months ago, I was walking up the lane one day and asked myself the question: ‘Are you able to live alone, I mean really alone?’

It occurs to me that maybe we should all be asking the same question; maybe we should all even be practising the fact to find out; maybe the ultimate definition of success in life is to learn to be content with nothing but our own company. How the hell would I know? I’m only human.

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So, back to the beginning: is this all about learning lessons? Well, maybe it is, but I have another question: since I don’t know what the purpose or meaning of life is, and since I don’t know where it’s all leading, what’s the point of learning lessons? I expect Mr Jung would say that it’s to add to the Collective Unconscious, that primordial matrix of archetypes through which we pass over and over again so that our sparks of consciousness might maintain the continuum of individuality.

Maybe it is, but maybe we shouldn’t think about it too much, or maybe we should think about it so much that we make the breakthrough and emulate the laughing monk.

I might lighten up later.