Chapter 1 – Perspectives on a Sunny Day
Life goes on.
That’s all I know. As far as I’m concerned, right now, life is trivial, pointless and boring. It’s nothing more than a repetition of the mundane, periodically interspersed with equally nonsensical novelty. Nothing makes sense. Sadly, today, that is exactly how I’m seeing it. There is no purpose to anything. It appears to fall into a reassuring pattern – but I think that is an illusion. Change is all there really is. You can be sure that nothing will last for long. Everything you do is doomed to be destroyed in the vagaries of time. Nothing lasts. It’s a pretty miserable state of affairs when you really get down to thinking about it.
I stood in the sanitised room, breathed the Dettol and allowed my mind to run freewheel. Well, I didn’t really allow it to run free, so much as lose control of it. I’d let go. There was no hand on the rudder. It went where it wanted and that appeared to entail a long string of gloomy observations. Right at this moment in time life was looking pretty miserable to me.
Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t always been this morbid; my brain has not always flowed in such a melancholy manner. I used to be a happy, easy-going, positive sort of guy. But that seems a long, long time ago now. I’m no longer that person. Life knocked that naïve optimism right out of me a long time before today.
It is days like this that have robbed me of my positive outlook, and I’ve had a few of these kinds of days. Though fortunately not too many on a par with this particular doozy of an example. This was in a category of its own – a kind of one-off. This truth is, for obvious reasons, you can only experience this event once.
Back when I was young ….. I could laugh at my own naivety ….. I used to postulate solutions to the world’s problems. I even used to have faith in the intrinsic goodness of human beings and believed there were things worth striving for. What a fool I was back then. That was before I realised the true nature of all those movers and shakers out there, the wealthy and powerful, greedily clawing in all they can, and willing to carve up their own grannies for self-advancement. They are a bunch of callous self-servers.
The problem is that I woke up to the reality of humankind but probably didn’t really believe. Today brought it all home with a vengeance.
It is strange what pictures play out on your eyeballs as you stand helpless in a situation like this; what horrid thoughts go through your head. I was certainly no longer in control of my own mental processes. My mind was rampaging down an extremely morbid track. A parade of dark thoughts distil out of nothing and chase each other around.
It occurred to me that, when it boils down to it, we are just glutinous sacs of chemistry; bags of minerals dissolved in water and suffused with ionised electricity. Nothing more.
Right now I had a pretty dim view of my species – not surprising, given the circumstances, I suppose.
We’re all to blame. None of us are guiltless.