thinking

Didn't want to call it musings cos this post is going to be a lot less pretentious than it sounds.

One phrase from the book 'Man's search for meaning' has been turning over in my head, he says that the elderly should not envy the young. Today's society places too much emphasis on potential, and not enough on experience and that is why there is a danger of neglecting the elderly and mature. He asserts that in fact, having done something is quite a remarkable reality and that is the asset of the mature.

After all, i quote, having been is an important part of being and surest of them all.

And at this stage when i am quite frazzled by the two roads that lie ahead of me, i am forced to think about this and draw my conclusions about big questions so I find the answer to the little question of, which job should i accept?

Of course one thing i have now definitely learnt is NEVER to make decisions hastily. Not even when people are pressuring you. It is better to lose an opportunity than to make a wrong decision.

But I am not sure yet if i have made the wrong decision. I am split into two, one Jessica rationalizing and desperately trying to analyze the situation in the time given, while also straining to get as far as possible from the second Jessica, who is accepting that the decision has in part been made and whose entire psychology is bent towards justifying it and taking the easier way out.

But back to the book, cos that was what i was thinking of in the first place.

I don't know how real that is for me. I get excited about what I am doing now, and even more excited about what I could be doing in the future, but I never get very excited or emotional about what I have done in the past. The past usually elicits a pleased, slightly satisfied sentiment, but never excitement and hardly even a lot of pride.

And worse still, the moment, once it becomes past, actually loses all its reality. It's like in the Matrix, and other countless knock off movies, I can even begin to doubt if i was even there. The past becomes a series of images, occasionally accompanied by tinges of remembered emotions, that run through the reel of my brain, and that's all. It's certainly not a very solid sense of being.

But I don't know, maybe he meant something more, maybe he meant that the accumulation of all our past experience creates the being we are now. Which does make a lot of sense, although it is something largely unconscious and not something we actively associate with our sense of identity.

But then how would this apply in terms of finding the meaning of life?

The book does strip everything down. It does answer more of the 'how' rather than the 'why' questions, but it does spend a lot of time encouraging us to search for the 'why'. I guess it is pretty naive to expect to find the exact answer to the meaning of life unless we are reading a religious book, but I do appreciate the fresh perspectives it has given me.

This morning while still thinking about my dilemma, there were images shown on TV of starving children in Ethiopia, all knobbly skin and bones, clinging onto life by a thread.

Too many thoughts to be written in one post so I still begin another.