AND ALL THE PIECES MATTER…

We’ve been on a long journey over the course of this last six months or so, you and I, probing and poking our metaphorical stick into the hornets’ nest that lurks in the darkest corners of Lesser Blogfordshire, and what have we really learned…? Maybe I should publish a questionairre for you to fill in to tell me what you’ve found out, but I don’t think that there would be much point. Anyway, if I admit to loathing, hating and detesting filling out any kind of forms myself, I can hardly expect the two of you to fill one in now, can I? Especially one as pointless as that would no doubt be.

I realise, of course, that there are precious few of you reading this stuff at the moment anyway, which is a bit of a shame really as you’ve missed out on some of the good stuff. Ah! Now I’ve been and gone and created a paradox. If you’re not reading it, what is the point of telling you what you’ve missed? And if you are reading it, you’ve not missed a thing as all the links are still sitting there in the margins desperately craving, pleading and hoping for your attention like kids in a line up at the edge of a muddy sports field waiting and hoping to be picked for the footballing sides early enough not to appear to be too uncool.

Of course, I’m assuming there that the schools do still have sporting fields and haven’t sold them all off to builders so that they can cram in dozens of the kind of new houses in which it would be literally impossible to swing a cat. Uh-oh! Now I’ve gone off on at least two tangents and wasted two separate and distinct topics that would each have taken up a morning’s thought on their own on any other day.

I wonder if anyone noticed? I do sometimes wonder whether I should insert a sentence about three quarters of the way down one of these pieces that is so utterly offensive that it would appal all but the very worst of you, just to see how closely this stuff actually gets read. Mind you, I realise that this would be a risky strategy and not one that would do me any favours, and if the TwitWorld is to be believed, could find me being locked up if I picked just the wrong sort of wording that could be considered to be some kind of threat. A threat? Me? The only thing threatening about me is how many more sentences you might have to plough your way through. Similar problems arise for promoting some kind of banned ideology, although none of those ideologies actually appeal to me enough for me to be able to even think of anything remotely positive to say about them.

Maybe when I get older…?

Ah well, at least the relative obscurity means that I can write what I like now. The only problem is that, with the insomnia, I don’t seem to be able to write anything at all. Insomnia remains a truly mind-mashingly dreadful thing. You remain utterly exhausted, totally in need of a good sleep and that’s the one thing you need you just don’t seem to be able to get. On the plus side, you do get a ring-side seat for the dawn chorus as it starts up, especially if you’ve left the window slightly open to try and keep the heat down.

It’s the sticky heat that does it, and the brain which tries to focus on the problem but somehow the problem becomes the problem and, whist you try and focus and sort it out you find the thoughts float away and won’t come together. Then you start to feel as if you’ll never string a rational series of ideas together ever again and whilst you’re feeling that you are incapable of stringing any rational thoughts together and then you start to fret about that and how your life in unravelling and so it goes and so it goes and you can’t doze.

Those are the times when the big thoughts start to arrive, the perspective shifts and the tiny fragments of knowledge start to spin around in an increasing tornado of thought and counter-thought. Is this where the imagination truly begins? Is this where new ideas and concepts are born? We sometimes believe that we’ve already learned all that there is to be learned and that we know pretty much everything about how the world works, but the strange thing is, I imagine that all the peoples inhabiting the previous civilisations rather believed that they understood their world totally too, and look at how wrong we think they were.

I wonder what it feels like to have your belief system totally overturned, to have everything you’ve ever been completely and utterly certain about suddenly be proved wrong? Say, for example, that you utterly and totally believe from your own experience and everything you’ve ever been told or taught that the entire universe revolves around the earth beneath your feet and then suddenly, one day, you’re told that this is not true and the earth revolves around the sun. What does that actually feel like? Will you ever really accept it, or will you spend the rest of your days in doubt and anguish or in doing your level best to disprove this obviously preposterous idea?

So, like the planets allegedly do, we come full circle (well, technically full ellipse I suppose...), because, in the end, all of this soul-searching and rattling on is just little old me trying to make sense of the world that I’m inhabiting. I don’t really imagine that anyone else sees it in quite the same way as I do, or even that they really care one jot about what I think. My own thoughts about most things can shift and transform on an hourly basis anyway, depending on what’s happening or what mood I wake up in (assuming, of course, that I’ve even got to sleep in the first place). Today I may like what tomorrow I’ll dislike, and so it goes. I suppose that it’s just part of the complicated jigsaw puzzle of being human, but just like with any jigsaw, all the pieces matter.