Being.

These are deeply anxious times, replete with ill-formed yet potent fears.

I wrote the following to somebody last night, somebody who said ‘I don’t know who I am out there.’

‘So you don’t know who you are out there. You never did, did you? That’s why you went inside yourself and found me, and why you still sometimes go back there and renew our acquaintance.

The world out there is a place for role playing; it’s what we all do. I’m fairly convinced that it’s entirely what we’re here for. Some of us realise it, most don’t. And those of us who do realise it grow tired of strutting and fretting the hour upon the stage because we know it’s probably all meaningless in the wider context of existence. When you get to that point, inside becomes the only place to find any meaning worth having. It’s a more honest form of reality in there.

So if you want to play the corporate bitch and snort cocaine through $100 bills, why not? And when you get tired of that role, move onto another one. I doubt it matters a jot when you come home to the real you. And playing roles is the one thing that keeps you from being lonely as hell, so you might as well get on with it and enjoy it.’

Had it been somebody else, I might have written something different. I don’t know. Neither do I know whether I’m right or not; the nature of being is such a complicated business. Or maybe it isn’t. The Laughing Monk would have us believe that nothing is simpler than being, it’s only the illusion that’s complicated.