Stumbling Blindly.

I was reading a few pages of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman tonight, and one of the characters reminded me of a woman I used to live with. She didn’t handle her liquor well, and she used to like me to hold her long hair back while she was vomiting into the toilet. It sometimes surprised me that she never asked: ‘Was I really revolting last night? It can’t have been very nice for you, having to hang over me while I threw up.’ She never did, but if she had I think I would have replied: ‘It really doesn’t matter. It’s only passing the time.’

Because that’s all we have, isn’t it? Time. We come into this world owning nothing but a load of time to do something with. There’s nobody to tell us how much time we've got, and nobody we can truly trust to tell us just what we’re supposed to do with it. And so we live by rules and expectations invented by other people who also don’t know what we’re supposed to do with it. It’s like being pushed into a dense fog by a blind man who says: ‘Go and find the thing.’ ‘What thing?’ you ask, but he’s disappeared.