Perspectivism

Before I get into the meat and two veg of this blog post just an update on my Movember effort:

Heavy Metal Thunder

Full heavy metal thunder after 3o days. I have toyed with the idea of keeping it and growing some sort of Afghan Mountain Fighter job. I reckon it would scare small children and add some gravitas to my professional ramblings but the idea of being looked at as a prop to a spectacular moustache kind of puts me off. the male version of a lady with amazing assets.

On the running front I’ve kept myself injury free and am now starting to think about a jaunt across the hills of Italy next May. I did toy with a long picnic across the hills of Scotland (the closing date was last weekend) but the Damoclean anxiety of this shadowing me until next June is just too much for me at the moment.

Now, on with the story: Is your glass half full or half empty?

It’s hard to tell these days and can depend on so much; how well your last run went (run being an interchangeable word for round of golf, wank, dog walk etc.), whether your significant other feels you’ve met and exceeded expectations (to use the toxic language of performance management), which way the wind is blowing and what time of the year it is and so on. You get the general picture.

What prompts me to spin-off this early in a blog post on some sort of poetical and philosophical tangent?

I have one or two trips to finish out my year at work. The one this week is a workshop in Brussels on not falling asleep in meetings (not really but you know what I mean). I’ve become exhausted from driving up and down to Dublin to catch the ‘plane to Brussels so I decided to save the planet (a bit) and use trains from Paris to Brussels and Brussels to Amsterdam for the trip home. I had a few hours to kill at Charles De Gaulle Airport yesterday while waiting for an onward train to Brussels. On a dull and grey December Monday this is not what you might describe as aesthetic Xanax pill. Acres and acres of soulless and impersonal concrete and dislocated humans in transit that can make the whole experience seem like a dystopian purgatory.

What was alarming was that I found it to be so beautiful I had to stop myself from beaming at strangers. The resonance between the architecture, the weather and my mind on the day evoked that feeling you get when you feel the warm hum of an electric razor over your skull and the (female) hairdresser blows across the back of your neck.

Now why was that? Would I have felt equally as disturbed by the scale and brutality of the architecture on a different day?

At this point in the thought process you don’t want to be googling this sort of thing. It turns out that that last question of mine is a whole other branch of human thought (Philosophy is the fancy name for it).

It turns out to be called Subjective Realism or Solipsism. In essence, the only thing you can trust to exist is your own mind. The rest could just be one long cinema projection.

To quote Hamlet: for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. 

Anyway, glass half full.