Tuesday, April 14, 2009

How to live?


I want desperately to complete my goal – to turn my back and walk away from a set of values I see as wrong and unhealthy. I thought coming to Ghana was the first step. Maybe it was. But now I’m in a country of wannabe materialists that are trying to construct what I’ve just left. My dream is to take to the hills and live in the mountains. My fear is that I would be bored stupid. Are our lives and identities forever determined by being in opposition? Is there any way out?
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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousApril 14, 2009 at 3:01 PM

    Graham

    From someone who has known you for over 30 years, I can say that it is your way to be opposed to the world and its ways - you have always wanted the world and human nature to be different, better. You should hardly be surprised at the ugliness of human nature, of people wanting to have more in the world materially. What makes you think that wherever you are, wherever you go, that it will be any different, and moreover, that if you wander far enough from society that you will some day find what you are looking for (if, indeed, you know what that is)?

    The world is what it is. However far we walk, and however long we stop in one place and get to grips with it, some of us will always want to walk on, be somewhere else, continue the search for Utopian perfection (or something even vaguley approaching it). Others of us, perhaps rather lazier, choose to deal with the world we know (including ignoring it!) rather than the world as we would like it to be. But do not be surprised one day to find that Utopia (like the end of the rainbow) does not exist. When that day arrives, so might the realisation that the physical travels are over, that you have come full circle, and that the solution to being at peace with the world comes from within, not without - from embracing the world rather than seeking to escape from it.

    I guess what I might be saying is that nirvana may well come not from seeking a better world, but from a metamorphosis in the way we think about the world as it is. If I was a cleric, which I am not, one might suggest that what you seek is spirituality - theistic or otherwise - a way of discovering how to be one with the world, and indeed, dare I say it, with one's self.

    AS (in post-Resurrection London)

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