How insignificant we are as humans, and thought, in a flash we are here and soon will be gone. Well if all goes according to the way we are throwing this planet away, eventually like a bowl of bacteria in a petri-dish we will use up all the resources and will either escape the confines of our dish of life or it will all end, a rather uns acrimonious (yes to those lexophiles, maybe not a real word, but it portrays my thought).
And where does this take me? No where actually, the rap-ture is just a side thought to our existence.
I must admit the mornings are no longer so Christian now that the Christians no longer pray at the station, every morning I peer around the corner and they are gone. One wonders how fickle life is, especially my perception fo them. They are most probably sitting in the McDonalds drinking hot chocolate and huddling around the table. It is only I who is in the belief that true enlightenment comes through personal self flagellation, well I suppose that is being catholic for you ;-). No seriously I always imagined that through hardship and self imposed struggle comes a form of enlightenment. But I am most probably wrong with regards all of this. It is true, this is a strange land and without a grain of doubt a complete stranger. This does not in any way denigrate the experience, but it is a strange place. Yet at this juncture I stand facing the distinct possibility of an imminent spora (one wonders what the singular of a word like diaspora is?) that our family could face if either my medical or the Pumkie's Medical is not acceptable to the immigration authorities. So where does that leave us? Not happy in any way, even though I am in the strange land, note not the promised land, I stand and await the future with baited breath.
So I sat wondering a day or so ago how to best describe our lives and the paths they take. It is somewhat of a case like trying to juggle glass balls, it looks absolutely amazing, the light reflecting and casting amazing colours all over the place, yet if a ball falls down it crashes and makes a huge sound and splinters into a thousand pieces, but all we do it sweep it up and toss it in the bin and start again.. Strange thought that.
I saw an interesting short movie a week or so back, It was called the butterfly circus. It is a preview for a movie. This movie was a winner of a number of short movie festivals. It is worthwhile watching, albeit schmultzy it is heartwarming, but the key to me is that the visual quality is just great. So you decide for yourself ;-)
On third and fourth thoughts after I have progressed a little further through the Black swan book, I must admit it is losing a little of its shine, not because it is bad or because the writing is specifically bad, but because he does not really get to a point, somewhat like a Blog a number of you may read on the odd occasion. What is the most striking about it at this stage is how he highlights our general lack of understanding of statistics and the impacts it has and does not have on our lives. Strangely we do live our lives not always on the direct impacts of stats or probability, but more often on the perceived impacts and outcomes. Nasem goes into a lot detail about gambling and luck and probability and why you cannot win because it is not only about probability, but also about the casino's which monitor trends against trends and you pop up as an outlier if you deviate from the current trends. He also goes through a whole lot of other really confusing statements, which i have resulted in me saying once again that I will have to reread this book a number of times, which do not give us specific answers rather more questions. He falls back on a very familiar, to me, argument of not actually committing all that much and falling back on the randomness of it all. In some sentences he flouts that it is better to be an outlier, because if you are not an outlier you will not win, but in the same breath he says being an outlier also gives you a greater chance of failure, which when stated like that sounds a lot more obvious, but this is done through a milieu of arguments and paragraphs that rapidly bleed into one argument and back to the original. So at this point i am not convinced, but I am not unconvinced.
Not being unconvinced, could that be any less commital ;-)
So another day, more clouds and rain .. and at this point I am not convinced if it is as bad as it is or not? It rains, it winds, it suns, it tains, the wind blows, first from the North then the South...
the view from my soggy standing point on the train this morning, oh how i hate soggy socks.. I am sure dr Zeuss could have done something with that...
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