A Human State of Affairs

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Said that the Cat.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Being a human person is such a silly, amusing and tragic state of affairs – all these things all at once. When I am not being a tremendously busy person, that is, a person tremendously busy chasing his own tail like a dog, it occurs to me that I suffer from schizophrenia in all areas of my life. My being a human person is a sort of schizophrenia all in itself. I am an amphibian of a creature, half animal and half spirit and these two sides are always in opposition to each other it seems. Usually I try and ignore my spiritual half and walk around like I am merely a highly evolved animal. This is okay for a while but I have been cursed (or so it would seem) with a love for the works of two very great men who always manage to tug at my spiritual strings; Professor J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. It doesn’t help that my good friend Dean introduced me to Dr Peter Kreeft, a contemporary philosopher who loves these two writers even more than I do and gives so much more insight to their works than I could ever have managed to discover on my own. I have mentioned what a slow learner I am many times in this blog, it takes me thrice as long to learn something that other people grasp immediately. By this I don’t mean that I’m stupid but simply that I grasp an idea quickly and then that knowledge evaporates and then I have to start again and repeat the whole process until the knowledge sticks to my brain. My brain glue, in other words, is of the cheap sort. As a result of my slow learning I find myself living in circular ruins – I always come back to where I started. I feel like Roland Deschain, doomed to always find myself back in that same old desert where it all began, following after the man in black as he flees across what seems to be the apotheosis of all deserts. I’m not so sure whether this is a good thing or not anymore. I usually think of myself as making progress as I try again, fail again and (I always hope) fail better. Anyway, I digress. Going back to what I was saying before; after being in contact with the works of the aforementioned geniuses I always find my way back to my spiritual self and realise that there is so much more to life than meets the eye. I find myself thinking of how scared I am of spending an eternity in hell and what a reality it is at the rate my life is going – I find myself face to face with my mortality.

The Road So Far

Past,
Future;
They all merge into this present moment
I’m a dude on the road –
I dare to disturb the universe
Within these pages
There are snippets and snatches
Of a life lived

- Charles Siboto


Hi there goodbuddy,

Navigating these circular ruins is proving to be more difficult than I imagined it would be and I’m having a hard time getting over my quarter-life crisis. I feel that I should be doing more with my life but I’m not sure what I actually mean by 'more'. I don’t feel like I’m really living at all to be honest. I’m not enjoying my work and studies as much as I did about two years ago and I feel slightly distanced from my friends and family. They all seem to be so much more alive than I am; they have problems that they care about solving and they’re all in ‘touch’ with their lives. When they’re happy they actually really look happy and when they’re in the doldrums they look pathetic... but pathetic in that way depressed people should look, you know. I, on the other hand, just feel murky. There are people out there whose lives are in total ruin and, in my darker moments, I think that even they have it better, they at least have ruins to work with. I just don’t have a clue what I’m doing! I’m neither coming nor going, nothing happens, it’s like I’m stuck in Beckett’s non-story, Waiting for Godot.

Usually I’m the first person to tell you how amazing life is and how much magic there is to be found if one takes some time to look around but that magic can turn out to be black magic at times – one million megatons of destruction. So all I’m saying is to be careful and always prepared for them (that mysterious bunch that I’m pretty sure are The Laughing Men Co.) dropping the bomb rather than not. I’m grateful for the fact that my life has been fairly pleasant up to this point but as a human being I get to whine about everything and nothing once in a while because ultimately I’m an ungrateful little bastard.

Don’t worry, though, it’s not all doom and gloom, I have that nastiest of diseases known as indefatigable optimism and even in my darkest hours I wear a little smile on my face and have the not-at-all-naive belief that the best is yet to come. I have no clue what I am to do about my quarter-life crisis other than to work harder at my studies (which I’m not actually in the mood to do to tell you the truth) and to kick off my Goodbuddies book drive. It’s Springing and I want to enjoy some sun without some stupid voice in the back of my head whispering that I’m an epic failure. They (these people again!) say that one foot up and one foot down is the way to London town... or some such... and right now London town seems as good a destination as any. Some of my favourite Poets lived there and they have the Thames in which to kill oneself if the business of living becomes too much to bear.

With great consideration I’ll choose the path to follow
I’ll pick up my sadness, madness and new-found gladness
And together we’ll walk down that winding path
Singing our tuneless song into the sunset
- Charles Siboto