You’re alone in your house and sitting lightly chilled and semi-comatose in your office, your elbows resting on the desk and your head languishing in your otherwise unoccupied hands. In front of you is the computer monitor displaying an inbox generating as much activity as a week old road kill, and its torpid state has become a matter of abject distraction. Outside the house the night has long since fallen into a cold, black, misty void, while your mood is an unwholesome mixture of boredom, depression, and a confused mingling of musings on the state of life in general and your own in particular.
And then some casual sense causes you to turn and look at the darkness clinging to the other side of the un-curtained window. There you see a Chinese woman, a complete stranger, looking back at you. What do you do? I’ve often wondered.
* * *
I don’t generally have regrets because it’s impossible to second guess fate, but one little gap in my history that I do occasionally think sadly about is the fact that I was never a fully committed rebel. I would sometimes begin a rebellious action, but give it up before it passed the point of no return because I was too lazy to be bothered with the consequences. And – for the same reason – even when I did carry through with something rebellious, I was always careful to have an ingenious explanation to hand so that I could be absolved from blame, punishment, and a deleterious reputation. It was probably the best of my list of dubious skills.
And I remember reading once in a book written by a Taoist – Osho, I think it was – that instead of denigrating lazy people, we should welcome them as valuable members of society because they rarely give any trouble. I suppose it’s also true to say that they rarely contribute very much either, so it must come down to which is the lesser of the evils.
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