Abrupt start to the fire season in SEQ and northern NSW
Crazy winds and extremely dry conditions have started the fire season catastrophically early in Queensland, Australia. The smoke plumes are now very clearly visible from space. (Image from the Himawari 8 satellite, at 1115 hrs AEST)
Life is a funny thing. Especially when it makes you blog at 5am!!
#Memories fromĀ October 30, 2010
Life is a funny thing eh? Its about the only thing I know that can make you deliriously happy and drown you in depression at the same time. No matter how hard you try to do or how much you want something, it remains just that little bit out of reach. The minute you stop trying or stop wanting something to happen, well, it just happens. May be then, the Golden Rule should be to never want what you want to get. But then again, that simply defeats the purpose doesnāt it? āCuz, if you really donāt want it, why would you want it when you get it? And, if you want what you get, how can you ever truly say you donāt want it? I will have to repeat myself and say once again āLife is a funny thing eh?ā.
Iām not someone who is much of a believer, leave alone being religious - but, if thereās one thing Iāve learnt in the last 23 odd years, it is that, no matter what Gods exist, the Irony Gods are a very tangible part of the universe. To just make things better, they just donāt sleep. Ever. Period. Be it at work, be it in personal life, be it anything at all, they love to inject some irony into the situation. Think about it. Think about what you do every day and see if you cannot find irony in almost every other thing.
Human nature doesnāt help. We drive ourselves into a tangle of thoughts and emotions and do our best to help the Irony Gods do their jobs better. For one, we as a species are unique. We are driven by emotion. And emotion is the Irony Godsā greatest weapon and their greatest weakness. We wrap ourselves up in a tangle of emotions that are often wildly in conflict with each other. We might love something with a passion today and hate it with a passion tomorrow or worse, tomorrow we might not know what to do with it at all. In the kaleidoscope of emotions that we lose ourselves in, we are no longer sure of what we want. The best example would be the case of the weather. We want it to be cool when it is hot, hot when it is cold, rainy when it is dry and dry when it rains. We want a wind when it is still and we want stillness in a storm. And to top it all off, we make it a case of emotions. Because we want something that isnāt there at that moment, we become emotionally charged and irritated, forgetting that yesterday when it was dry weād have been happy for some of todayās rain..!! Why do we do this? (If I could indeed answer that, I wouldnāt be asking. Would I?)
Then again, we as a species are driven to succeed. We always want things that we donāt have and once we have them, we want something that we think is better and we call it āgoing for successā. There is always an excuse for not wanting what we can actually have (which is most often what we actually need). For wanting what we canāt have, there are never any excuses. We just want it. Even if we know it is definitely a bad thing, we still WANT IT. The question here should be, do we really āwantā those things we want? Or do we just want them because we are āsupposedā to want them? I was talking to a friend today about how people want to do certain things because that is what they believe society expects of them; and society in turn thinks that people want to do certain things, so it starts expecting it of them. Quite a contrary tale, isnāt it? Once we sort it out, the fact that remains is that most of the time we arenāt doing things for ourselves or the society. Weāre doing stuff that we imagine we need to do. More importantly we have no darned idea of what we should actually be doing. And that IS the whole irony of things.
Before all of you humanists there start tearing me apart for being inhuman by denying the āhumanā, āemotionalā part of myself (or for being a āgreen-blooded, pointy eared, unfeeling Vulcanā as Dr. Leonard McCoy so succinctly puts it), Iām as emotionally driven as you are. That is why this blog post exists. As for those of you tut-tutting, shaking your head and going āTsk-tskā¦ What a pessimistic view of lifeā¦!!ā, Iām no pessimist folks. I donāt find the irony in my life sad. I find it amusing. Well, most of the times at least. Iād be lying if I said otherwise. Its the feeling of complete contrariness that life seems to epitomise, that allows me to smile my way through situations Iād be devastated by if I couldnāt see the irony in them. As for why Iām ranting about random stuff at five in the morning - thatās a good question. The answer is pretty straight forward. The time when Iām supposed to be lost in slumber is the time when a series of events from the recent past decided to come together to put me on this train of thought and keep me awake. Now isnāt that ironical?
The sun is rising. Iām going to eat a cookie and go to bed.
It has been a very long time since I have spent any decent amount of time in an actual crowd. Ever since I moved to Australia over a decade ago, it has been heavenly. No throngs of people to wade through. No traffic jams. No hanging out of a train. And most importantly, no need to shout to make myself heard. šĀ
Getting caught up in the morning rush hour yesterday brought back memories. Yep, I agree with everyone who says rush hour here in Brisbaneās getting worse. But compared to what I used to deal with in India this was nothing.
Thinking of this, I was reminded of something Iād scribbled down in a book back in Nov 2008 - when I lived in India. In trying to find it, I had to wade through loads of musty archived papers and ended up discovering quite a few random thoughts and essays - some of which hadnāt even made it to the old version of Scribbling on the Sidewalk.Ā
Reading them now, I can see that they are about things that are as relevant now as they were back when I wrote them. So, Iāve decided to publish them and some of the posts from Scribbling on the Sidewalk v1.0 here under the label āMemoriesā. Click on the tag #Memories below this post to find them.
Scribbling on the Sidewalk used to be my outlet in the blogosphere the better part of 10 years ago. It lasted about 2 years before life intervened and it fell by the wayside.Ā
Well, here we are again, at a new beginning. Letās see how long this journey lasts.
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