Tuesday, 7 April 2015

Declining the New Wisdom.

I’m becoming ever more intolerant of those New Agey and self-help gurus who claim to know what life is about and offer instruction on how to live it to the full.

(I never really understood what ‘living life to the full’ means anyway. How is jumping about in a nightclub every weeknight, going bungee jumping every Saturday, and surfing with the gang on alternate Sundays, any more full than sitting by an open fire in the winter reading Kafka’s The Trial and ruminating on the state of existence? They’re just different. Wherever you aim yourself, living is surely still a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and carrying on through that curious constant we call time until the path runs out and you fall over. What does ‘full’ mean?)

But back to the gurus. I read one once who said that if you possess something which you haven’t used for more than twelve months you should throw it away. That’s a bit of a generalisation, isn’t it? If we’re talking about something of relatively minor consequence like a wife or a promising career in the Civil Service, then maybe. But that little plastic model of a Spitfire which you built from an Airfix kit when you were eight? I don’t think so, somehow.

(I know I've muttered something similar before, but when you're not living life to the full and garnering sufficient material for three blog posts an hour, the only remaining option is to try Variations on a Theme.)

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