It's 2.15 AM. And I am, as usual, having trouble sleeping. I'm thinking of things that I shouldn't be, and worrying about other things that are beyond my control. I'm wondering about the future, and contemplating what it holds for me - and for the people I hold dear. I'm hoping that things will take a turn away from the dreary, and that by some miracle, circumstances will fall into place. I laugh at myself, silently, when I realise how silly I sound in my own head - and how, as I watch myself, I am constantly striving to amuse myself by belittling me.
But most of all, I'm waiting for the future. Waiting to see what it holds, and to respond to it. I'm not, by most measures, a very impulsive person. I like to see things happen, and then react to them and have my ends and means crystallise. People who plan, organise, and try to bend the world to their will don't appeal to me and neither does their perspective of the world. The world's a funny, crummy, and jaded kind of place - but it has a terrible and stupefying inertia that will not be outdone by the mere jottings on paper of a few, in their intellectual ivory towers. Gandhi said that one should be the change that one is trying to see in the world, and I fully believe in that. But no plan, no one take on anything, is going to change the world.
------------------------
Terry Pratchett and his universe never cease to stupefy me in their variety, their humour, their good natured mischief, and what I suspect to be one of the most astute sociological deconstructions of human society. Pratchett's take on deductive reasoning (such as that exercised by Sherlock Holmes in fiction) amused me to no end - he said that the sort of person who looks a man up and down and concludes by calluses on the hand, clothing, etc. that an individual performs a certain function in society, has a certain career, and so on is completely belittling of the depth and variety that the human experience or understanding provides us - because for every deduction that one makes, one misses out a plethora of possible explanations for that set of circumstances which, while highly improbable, still manage to happen quite often merely due to the size and complexity of the globe we live in.
------------------------
