when faced with one own mortality

Yes this is stereotyped, but is not a treatise to having a MLC...

I got a thinking sometime back, it could have been days, minutes or hours ago, but it recurs. We often make statements like, if i was going to, if that happened, and many others (*&* and the comma makes sense here ). But the point being we tend to live our lives based on riders and axioms about conditional activities, granted it does make sense in most cases. But you have to question if the world is not divided into those who take the pictures of the amazing things and the others who live their lives vicariously through the images transposed through either the printed or electronic media. Yes there is a grey or is that gray, could never figure that one out, view on all of this? Yes there is and is not, and there is a distinct randomness about a lot of this, to which we have no answer to.

To get off that point and onto another, Btw an Awesome book to read (NOTE: I have taken this out of the Bibliothecke.. and will never finish it in the mandatory 3 renewals, it is a book that needs to be bought and ruminated over), but I must warn is in the same vane as Malcom gladwell's books, but requires a whole lot more commitment and rumination as it is in my mind the thinking mans version of MG's books. Oh yes the book, I mentioned it before, is the black swans by Naseem N Taleb.

.....wikilink to Taleb's book.


As a phrase "Pictures from the end of the world." could mean so much, could it mean the literal end of life as we know it, does it mean the end of society as we know it, does it mean the figurative ends of the earth?


But what do we do when we get faced with our mortality? I don't know as I am not there, in the real short term? Well in a way we are, we have to redo our medicals for our damned PR. But there are others who have more concrete implications, but we do live our lives in a perpetual hedge. We always have a predefined event window of living. We don't seem to be able to escape the continual re-evaluation and hedging of life against the external constraints that in most cases we put there, but sometimes are put there by situation.

But to get the actual point of my thought process, well there are two, the first being; we are now faced with the distinct, albeit slim, possibility that we could be forced to return to the Z of A,  which in a way is very confusing, in some senses it is the familiar, in other senses it is scary. The second being the way we do not live our lives. We spend an inordinate amount of effort and bind our selves to the way we live our lives and not nearly as much to how we do not live our lives. We ponder and ponder but often, granted there are those who do, but don't. This at best sounds entirely ambivalent, at worst it is a reality, the event window of reality is pure ambivalence. So where does that leave us?

What can we be clear about, in general there is not a lot that we can be sure of, especially in the light of Black Swan events. Somehow according to Taleb they are outside of our current frame of reference and thinking. So what do we do in these cases, die, survive, live, rebuild, rise like a phoenix. Soemthing we cannot be sure of is what is next, we stand on the brink of a rapture,  a swarm of earthquakes where there should be none, a massive earthquake where there should be one, all we can be sure of is change and at a magnitude that we cannot be prepared for. But Naseem does remind us that being aware of random events does not mean we must eb afraid of them, i am paraphrasing significantly here ...

So where does this take us or put is in the light of swarms of great black swans which currently circle this small insignificant 3rd stone from the Star we call SuN.  I must admit that we have to continue on as best as possible within reason one would assume...

But I do suppose we cannot really change who we are and how we live without the fear of being ridiculous, but it does seem like a good idea to at least challenge some of the levee's we have put in place around our lives. I suspect keeping levees around us is not a bad thing, the question being when is the fear of the black swan realistic and when is it paranoia and is there value in protecting against the cygnet or not?

On a different note it has come to my attention that the Christians have once again deserted me in my morning solace, the rain and cold has limited if not totally removed their presence from the position of their prayers. Like the seasons causes the leaves to fall off the trees the people no longer gather in the bus shelters to do their early morning prayers, but rather they have been blown away, it may not be the wet, the cold or the wind... It could just be the dark.


But All I say ToDay is go forth, gather the sand bags but not to protect you lively hood, but rather the boat you are storing to go forth and explore the unknown ...