Nineteen

I said when I was nineteen I would lead a useful life. Throw off the angst of adolescence, become a man of endeavour and history but do we ever really achieve? Even when we have scaled the walls of the castle and fought the foe till he is dead, do we actually triumph in our own eyes? Are our purple ribbons a happy and satisfying memoir to what we have wrought on life’s highest ramparts? While the crowd murmurs its fickle appreciation.

Sometimes I am sick of myself and my fawning ingratiation with my own sense of importance. My sense of self pleasure which alone wrestles with even my best moments of selfless abandon, to add question to whether I have indeed any good or any real worth over my overwhelming need to satisfy my self.

One really can go mad with this.

I am coming to the realisation that each day is indeed a re-run of the last and despite the intrusion of suffering we are caught like struggling flies on the papers of the mundane and repetitive. The record is not so much stuck but constantly set to ‘return’ as in that marvelous movie ‘Groundhog Day’ and as we have no alibi or ally that will fake the evidence, yesterdays dreams do amount to little more than ashes.

Only the fact that I am and do exist seems in some small but intrinsic dimension able to unravel the wooliness that can suffocate the creative mind and any vestige of spiritual influence. The ego stands up once more and demands recognition while we wrestle to stand proud and true and wholehearted in our own honest shoes.

Of course ‘others’ it seems have no such pretensions and exist, it seems, the happier for it which in turn begs the question, is intelligence an asset or a curse? Would the frailty of mind that blinds a Shakespeare ‘fool’ to gratification be rather a softer joy than the apparent torture of the tempest which assaults from within the melancholy of the bipolar and the innovational brain. Pity the fool? No, pity the scholar!

The more we resolve such dilemma’s the more personal space we find upon our island that we must conquer to survive. If you can find and live that fool’s folly then despite having not attained you will at least have learned and can quiet yourself and wait like Antartica’s albatross for your life mate to return.

Whats that coming over the hill, is it a monster?

writtenbyedenbray09.08.2017