I haven't written here for a while and so I thought, while I was in a bit of a contemplative mood, I would make an attempt to note some things down that I've been thinking recently.
It's strange how things are never more alive than when you contemplate mortality, how you want to reach out and touch things, hold in the smell of an autumn morning with leaves fallen fresh on the ground, as if you can breathe it all in and absorb it so it will stay with you forever. I was at a gig tonight watching a very fine singer called Emmy the Great and there was a lyric, 'I'll sprinkle champagne upon your bones'. It just paints the most comforting picture of death somehow.
This all sounds incredibly melodramatic and a little morbid, so I'll move on. I'm on the verge of seeming all EMOtional huh. I have been thinking a lot about life in general recently though, how things are moving on and changing. The third year of university seems to be spattered with feelings of intense fear and intense excitement at the prospect of the future, dispersed mostly in equal measure with a sort of bipolar quality. It reminds me of the Robert Frost poem..."Two roads diverged in a wood,/ And I took the one less travelled by/ and that has made all the difference." I remember reading it as a kid and thinking I would always be the one to take the path less travelled, but the temptation sets in sometimes to just remain static. It is, after all, so much safer. I have to fight against this urge, because I know there's a difference between living and living.
Hmm I will stray away now from the personal to more general matters that have bothered me recently. Haha, I seem to use this as purely a method to rant...to myself, as no one ever reads it. I don't really want people to if I'm honest. But I never write anymore, and I should, and this is a lazy way of expressing some thoughts which maybe one day will become something better.
Anyway...I encountered (once again) some common preconceptions this week, particularly concerned with Africa, which led me to become mildly annoyed. The pre-conceptions read something along the lines of..
1. All African governments are corrupt and even if we give them money, it won't get to the people who really need it, so what's the point?
2. When international structures remain as they are what is the point in small projects working in the country, surely these will never do anything in the grand scheme of things.
3. That the African people don't know what they want, let alone what they need so they would only use aid ineffectively
4. We've cancelled a bit of debt and we gives them loads of aid through our taxes, surely that's enough
...and the one that annoys me most of all...
4. We should liberalise all markets as it would promote global prosperity which would trickle down into prosperity for the whole world *vomit*
There are about a million things wrong with each of these arguments commonly held by, not the Conservatives, fascists and narrow minded ignorants but *shock horror!* by normal common or garden otherwise very liberal (in the political sense) minded people who recycle their newspapers and buy fair trade tea at the cafeteria.
I will complete this tomorrow though, for tonight I feel I am too tired to make sense. But just to let you know this wasn't intended as an emotional outpouring....But the best intentions.......
