4/29/04 - Birthday Ramblings...

Today is my birthday... and, being a songwriter type (and a human being) I've spent the sunny California day intermittently pondering the meaning of life. You know, the big questions, what am I doing here, where are the thunderous revelations from giant bearded faces in the sky, am I happy, am I where I want to be, am I gonna be a rock star, is my butt too big etc etc...

In between taking my shirt to the drycleaners, going to work, making lunch, cleaning the smudges off my driving glasses, dropping some old china off at the Goodwill and plucking my eyebrows, I boiled the issue down to two evergreen old questions:

1) what makes life worthwhile, and
2) why are we so obsessed with knowing what makes life worthwhile?

I cycled lazily through the usual laundry list of worthwhile things -- love, friendships, music, sunsets, self-realization, red wine, the kindness of strangers... all true after a fashion, but not really what I was looking for... As for the obsession with knowing why, I started thinking that it seems to be part and parcel of the enormous, ravenous human capacity to crave, to need, to want, to desire, to long for, to seek out, to hunt down, to pack up, to box away, to close off, to destroy...

So then I thought, maybe the way to truly make life worthwhile, enjoyable, fulfilling, would be to put an end to this need to know what makes life worthwhile, enjoyable and fulfilling. To stop this drive to pack ideas and thoughts neatly into boxes; this drive to categorize and photograph and record every little thing; to "understand" it; to pin our existence up like a dead butterfly in a dusty glass case and glance at it with enormous self-satisfaction once a week on Sundays over tea and biscuits.

For some reason, that Monty Python skit then came to mind, where all the great philosophers are busily running around playing football (that's soccer to the Americans among you); along with my friend Toby's belief that the world would be a far better place if only everyone traveled by ostrich, and my recollection of the time I went swimming in the sea in England in winter with all my clothes on and then travelled home for an hour on the train dripping wet and freezing cold.

Utter absurdity. Maybe it's the answer to everything? You can't successfully argue against it or truly understand it because its premise never made sense in the first place. So you can't pin it up and lock it away. It takes you outside the dusty glass case you live in every day, makes you look at the world a little differently. And that can only be a good thing, I think.

Maybe some form of happiness then lies in allowing thought, belief and existence to be organic, ever-changing, always in motion; an interplay of ideas rather than a framed painting with a set composition etched on its canvas?

Eh. What do I know? I'm just a year older... and still very much in love with friendship, music and red wine... :)

I recently shared a silly little secret of mine with a friend, that I often go and stand in a ridiculous place in my house, a place where I would never usually be, and spend time viewing the room from there (last week it was underneath the kitchen countertop). It opens things up somehow. I guess all absurdity does that, all paradox does that, showing us that there is much we have not thought of, and much we are entirely incapable of understanding. Ever... So that maybe there is no need for answers.

And for some reason that makes me very happy.

It made me even happier when my friend smilingly admitted that he does the same thing...

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joanna@joannamcmeikan.com
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