There is no real success in life, but in the glimpses of immortality we are sometime afforded. How our understanding of death shapes and grounds our lives gives them purpose and significance. Understanding the thing that renders our life meaningless, ironically gives it meaning. What does this mean day-to-day? It means involving oneself in the wellbeing of the community and experiencing everything as acutely as possible, filling your days with sudden liberating thoughts, original moments of fleeting insight, that come in a formless flash and are gone in the same way…. Those privileged moments when there is no thought of time … momentary freedom from what Burroughs described as “the claims of the ageing, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh”. Then occasionally we can bypass the brain’s instinct to busy itself with analysis and tap into a deeper well of sensation and experience The other factor, that you doubters are free to blindly ignore, is that I have an awareness - in sports in general - that isn’t normal for most players. I’ve had it since I was young. I often take it for granted but remember it when, like now, I finish playing (basketball) and come back to reality and think how many plays I made that happened independently of thought and made people say “wow” and “how did he see that”. I’m inconsistent, even with basketball, but you won’t see many players making as many special plays as I do. That’s a fact you can accept or ignore. It doesn’t matter. But I am a force of nature. And, with football, that most rudimentary of games, I only needed to develop the basic skills (I still never practiced once, or need to) for the awareness and fluidity and voracity to be transferred from the court to the pitch. Who the opponent is makes not one bit of difference: the only factor is me and my capacity on a given day to disappear into myself and allow my body to take control of the game on my behalf. An obvious but overlooked idea: that ontological solipsism / the ingrained self-other dichotomy underpins social inequality. How (a change in) that theoretical stance could influence political action in any practical sense remains to be seen… Well, we should give up our salaries for one 😅 We always read about the importance of aiming to be happy, to ‘love myself’ and focus on personal goals. It might be prudent instead to live what Socrates called a life of Virtue, to Flourish, and not always ask what do I want from life, but what the world might require from me
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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