Winds of Change.

My little world is under threat at the moment. The death of my neighbour and the new system of managing the estate properties are bringing changes that are not to my liking so far. It seems that my personal five-year golden age might be coming to an end, or at least being substantially depleted.

In my virtual world, I’m now almost at the end of the epic novel Mists of Avalon. As I said in an earlier post, this book has drawn me in like no other, and it’s set against the backdrop of the major social, political and religious upheaval that followed the withdrawal of the legions from Britain. When you get that drawn in by a story, you feel what’s happening to the characters.

But, of course, this is minor stuff indeed compared with the devastation being wreaked on people’s lives through the unrest in the Middle East and the natural disasters in Japan, Queensland, New Zealand, Brazil, and so on. It has me thinking of people throughout history who have had the winds of suffering and destruction forced upon them – the German Jews in the 1930s, the victims of imperial aggression, the Midwest farmers during the dust bowl days etc, etc, etc.

I suppose all this reminds me that any reliance on the concept of security is foolish. Any one of us might be lucky and have a settled, peaceful life this time round, but we need to be forever strengthened against the possibility that something beyond our control might come along and turn everything upside down tomorrow.

This might sound like a pessimistic post, but it isn’t really. It’s just a recognition of how life is, and it’s all pretty obvious. We all know that the only certainty in a material life is the inevitability of material death. It’s why I’ve always been so concerned to find out what lies beyond the material, and it's partly why I find the modern obssession with material ambition quite laughable.