Hello world, this bright, shining rock that spins casually on its orbit, slowly revolving around a great mass of heat and energy, living a very co-dependent life with this burning gaseous monster, knowing that its life and existence depends upon it, but it will be the thing to ultimately end its life too. To need something that you know will kill you, end you, and be remorseless as you fail to exist away from its cruel clutches.
What even is true independence? The sun is a selfish, emotionless life-giver, and yet we all owe it our everything. And the Earth is patient and kind, it gives and gives and frankly takes little away, if you compare how many are born and live each day to how many stop living each day. This planet is over-stuffed with its generosity to feed us, house us and care for us. I believe that if there is a something up there, like a God, or whatever, it cannot choose between who to look after and who not to. It cannot pick a race or ethnicity, a place, a gender, a sexuality, an age, an ambition, or amount of ambition, a hope or chance in the future - it cannot decide who does and does not live, it simply gives everything to everyone, and the times it takes away are sporadic, unpredictable, yet we can learn from. We can learn which areas of this planet are most likely to suffer from drought, wild fires, mass spread of diseases, from natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and avalanches, and if we are fortunate enough to live in one of the lucky areas of the world that is very safe from these things, do we praise the rain every day for helping our crops to grow? Do we dance in the sunlight, rejoice in the process of photosynthesis, or thank the greater beings for our plentiful harvests? Do we look out to our flat and undisturbed countryside and thank our parents for living in this beautiful and harmless environment? Do we look upon horses, the biggest animals found wild in this country, if any wild ones are even left, and respect their power and grace, knowing that the much bigger monsters that roam the northern territories, the deadlier creatures with poisons and bites and stings that can kill, are miles and miles from us as we sleep safe and sound in our beds each night? Do we relish in the vast and incredible history our country has to offer, countless battles and wars lost and won, Kings and Queens dating back farther than our minds can even conceive, a relic which we touch and cannot imagine who else has touched it, used it, and been left in the history books, perfectly preserved through our glorious national pride and our heavily set importance of remembering what has passed, and remembering those who sacrificed, battled, loved and died for this country; within each village and each town and each city throughout this country is a place of worship, a great church or cathedral, built beautifully and thoughtfully so that all the praising of our bounty and good fortune could be done in the most elegant and respected of buildings, and each of these landmarks is surrounded by a reflection, a memory, and a plaque to those who lived, breathed, and once made some mark in this world, and their names are etched upon a stone, and they will be forever part of this country for they are buried in our soil and we have remembered them, and even those with no names or bodies, we make great memorials for, and we spend a day each year thinking of those who have fallen, unknown, slipping through the cracks in the history books into a place we cannot imagine, yet we try to put our minds there, and we try to become one entity of thought, a whole country praying that those people know they are still thanked each year, for fighting the good fight and giving us what we have today.
If those people knew how our country would be today, I don't know if they'd have fought as hard.
And the true question I pose is this: why do we do the things that we do? To what purpose, to what achievement, when we all know that we cannot live forever, what is it we want to leave here? What immortality do we wish to create for ourselves? Because each day I wake up and I work, and I earn money, and I long to spend it immediately on traveling, seeing my friends, seeing the world and taking in the beauty that I feel I cannot see whilst I'm stuck here, yet that money I earn is for my education for the next year, but what is that even for? I will still want to travel and see my friends, but I will just have to wait longer to do so. And will my education benefit me immediately, or will I have to wait a few more years until I reap the rewards? And what the hell is it I hope to reap from it anyway?
Right now, I am at a loss. I can make money doing jobs that I hope I don't have to do forever, and I feel so distant from everything around me, and I have this horrible sensation that I am becoming too attached to one of my only friends in Norfolk, but I think it might actually be a self-destructive attachment because I don't believe he wants to be that person to me, so inevitably I will get hurt, but my heart would rather be in pain than numb and not feeling anything at all. I want to go see Maria; I want to look at life positively, and I want to enjoy every moment I live, but my body slumps and shrugs, and instead of doing exercise I watch Buffy, and instead of writing a short story I write a long and whiny blog post. I need a change. September 24th is my hope right now. September 24th is the start of the new me, and there'll be no looking back.