Stress and Stuff.

It occurred to me today that life is too short to be wasted on pursuing a career.

It’s not a position I’m taking seriously and so I don’t need to explain or defend it. I certainly haven’t wasted my life on pursuing a career, but that had more to do with my need of freedom and a predilection for radical change when the situation permitted.

And yet I’m still tempted to wonder whether people in the developed world are less happy these days than they used to be, now that they’re forced to endure the twin stresses of aspiration and competition from an early age. It seems that nowhere is this truer than in Japan where they have an alarmingly high rate of school age suicide. (I gather they have an unenviable rate of working age suicides, too.) Is that merely coincidental?

For most of history people simply got on with following the road allotted to their class. In the case of the class in which I grew up, it meant that the men went off and laboured in the fields, factories and coal mines, while the women submitted themselves to a different form of labour and then spent their days tending to the consequences. Hardly an ideal situation, I know, but if it’s stress you’re concerned about you do have to wonder whether we’ve simply jumped from the rock to the hard place.

But this is all tediously familiar, and I really must resist the tendency to be tedious now that I’ve been released from limbo and sent back to the land of the living (albeit temporarily, I expect.) I need to rediscover my sense of humour if I’m to have a place to call home.

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I haven’t seen my friend the llama for a long time. I wonder whether it was something I said.

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The Shire is unusually colourful this autumn. Even my favourite oak tree in Church Lane had golden leaves today. Oak trees are not normally associated with autumn colour, that distinction being reserved more for the beeches and sycamores. I’ve certainly never seen this particular oak dressed in golden leaves before, yet there it was as I walked up the rise, washed by the pale autumnal sun and looking quite resplendent.

*  *  *

I hope there’s pudding.