Raison d'être

Yesterday I walked past a fellow employee of the BBC who couldn't walk properly on one leg. I think his leg was deformed, and he looked in terrible pain with every step. It made me realise, quite unusually for early in the morning, that I am a very lucky man. Lucky to have the privileged and relatively luxurious life that I have.


Yet despite realising I'm lucky to have this life, lately I have been both consciously and sub-consciously questioning the point of living. This is quite natural for someone who has recently experienced the death of someone they loved, but nonetheless it's a question to which I have to find an answer in order to go on, as must we all at some point.


I don't mean I'm suicidal, or ever have been. But when life is unimaginably cruel, you lose the sense of raison d'être that you once took for granted and the banality of every-day life becomes more stark than ever, contrasted against the drama and uniqueness of such a tragedy. I suppose you could call it perspective, but it seems to be more vivid than the fleeting kind of perspective one gets when life seems full of possibilities over a pint or two.

So how do I answer that inner monologue that poses the question, over and over. What's the point? Why bother? You're going to die anyway and your chances of being etched into the history books of the world as a rich, famous or saintly figure are pretty small, and even if it happened, you'd still be too dead to appreciate it.


My favourite answer is the one advocated by most of the world's main religions - the point of life is to live for others and to improve their lives. But imagine if "others" similarly perceived the futility of life and were themselves living only for others. Would it work if everyone was just living for the benefit of other people? Maybe, because at least everyone would have a reason for living. And in the end, living for others is to some extent a self-satisfying act (and therefore could be simultaneously an act of 'living for yourself').

If you're not satisfied with the 'living for others' approach, you might find, as I do, that Regret is a fairly robust motivator for living. I give it a capital 'R' to distinguish it from the kind of passive, ruminating regret that leaves you spending your days wishing you could turn back time. I don't mean that kind of regret, but rather the anticipatory Regret you feel about not fulfilling your potential, or experiencing enough of what the world has to offer. If that doesn't give you the will to live, then I reckon nothing will, because anyone who could ignore Regret is ignoring the fact that, as the humanist celebrant at Claire's funeral pointed out: we only get one chance at life, and it's our duty to make the best of it.

Responsibility

The press is obsessed with the latest revelations that - surprise surprise, Westminster MPs are (ab)using their privileges to claim taxpayers' money for expenses which, although "within the rules", they probably shouldn't be claiming on moral grounds.

Whilst the constant coverage of this topic bores me to tears, the subject of morality in politics is an interesting one.

I went to see a series of short plays at the weekend called "The Great Game", which was about the history of the "War in Afghanistan" up to the present day. I have to admit that I was not up to date at all on the situation in Afghanistan - the whole subject had become a bit like Iraq for me, i.e. a series of repetitively negative news stories that I felt it best to, at least partially, ignore in order to preserve my peace of mind.

The play was really engaging and it became clear that morality is the central issue in the Afghanistan story, impossible to sidestep, however inconvenient it may be. It seems clearcut that it would be 'immoral' to withdraw military presence in Afghanistan while the (morally corrupt) Taliban controls about 50% of the country. But at the same time, each soldier has to justify morally his reasons for going back on tour after tour of duty, while his loved ones live in constant fear. 

And it is more complicated when there is more than one moral viewpoint around the same question - e.g. is it 'moral' to destroy Afghan poppy fields to prevent opium production or would it be better to encourage the fields to grow if it can be guaranteed that the resulting wealth will mean improvements to the poor living standards of ordinary Afghan villagers? Perhaps if the moral issues had been considered a long time ago, such dilemmas wouldn't exist in the first place and the focus of the world's attention would be elsewhere.

The MPs expenses question is so much simpler - there is no question that it is morally wrong to abuse taxpayers' money. But there is also a wider moral point to be made about the reporting of such revelations - for example, does the press have a moral obligation to include some coverage of positive work done by the government or by MPs, even if they fear they won't sell as many papers? Is it the role of the press to scrutinise parliament only in a negative way? Does the press not have a moral duty to focus the collective consciousness on positive developments, especially in times of economic gloom? And anyway, who is scrunitising the moral practices of the press? Is it 'moral' for the Daily Mail to encourage a "them vs us" mentality towards ethnic minorities in the UK? And what about the Daily Telegraph hosting a blog by a BNP councillor, in which he gets to rant about how opposing the incitement of hatred towards immigrants is "political correctness". Is that not morally represensible and in need of scrutiny?

Personally, I'm glad that the media has pressurised Westminster into improving its MPs expenses policy - but I'd really like the press to take some moral responsibility by telling us about something good for a change. There is a lot of good work being done by MPs that we never hear about, unless we are geeky enough to watch BBC Parliament or read Hansard. And maybe if the public were focussed on positive issues, the answers to moral questions in quagmires like Afghanistan and Iraq would appear more obvious - in the absence of gloom, there is more clarity and mistakes can perhaps be more easily avoided from the outset.

Everything has a beginning

How do you begin a blog? I'm not even sure if I'll ever tell anyone about this blog, so it probably doesn't matter how I start. Hmm. It looks like I've started anyway, so maybe I did know how to begin after all.

I plan to just write what's on my mind, and eventually I might develop some sort of theme and structure. But for now, it'll be ramblings, but hopefully reasonably interesting ones. And if not, you can always just stop reading.

If you're still with me...it's a sunny Sunday and I'm going to Claire's grave in Highgate in about an hour with her friend, Sara. I'm not really sure if it will have a positive or negative effect on my state of mind, but it feels right to go there, so I am. 

Claire died on 12th February 2009, almost 3 months ago. We were only together for 5 months, though we fitted together so well, it felt like we'd known each other for years and years. Claire would have relished a Sunday like this. She told me she rediscovered the joy of Lazy Sundays after we met. As a result, Sundays now feel to me less like melancholic precursors to Mondays, and more like a twenty-four hour pool of possibilities. 

I'm going to take a poem I recently found and read it at her grave. It's called "Song" by Allen Ginsberg and here's an extract:

The weight of the world

             is love

Under the burden

            of solitude

Under the burden

             of dissatisfaction

        The weight

the weight we carry 

         is love...

...No rest

               without love

no sleep

             without dreams

of love - 

           be mad or chill

obsessed with angels

              or machines,

the final wish

              is love

- cannot be bitter,

           cannot deny,

cannot withhold 

             if denied:

the weight is too heavy

                     - must give

for no return

            as thought

is given

            in solitude

in all the excellence

              of its excess.