Resource

25 May 2010


I don’t know if I count as resourceful. I’m certainly not very practical, but I do manage to find a way through life despite, essentially, being so grossly unprepared for it that I should be dead about 50,000 times over, probably through malnutrition or accidentally forgetting that standing in front of elephants is dangerous.

Life’s a big, scary complicated thing. I imagine that most people don’t spend an enormous amount of time considering their relationship to shifting tectonic plates, evolution, solar flares, wildebeest migrations, mud, isotopes, the orange harvest, Mount Kilimanjaro and Uncle Ben’s boil in a bag egg fried rice. You’d never get anything done. So I often like to remind myself that no-one – no matter that they might be successful game players in the competition of Life like Rupert Murdoch or Sir Terry Tesco or whatever his name is, actually knows very much in the big scheme of things. They might know more about high finance and the manipulation of ordinary human beings, but they’d be stuck if they were asked to extemporise for 30 seconds on what makes a toaster happy.

These things get me through the day.