A thought a day

You know that feeling when you start the day with a thought that then colours everything? Sometimes it has to do about the future. Sometimes it’s a thought about the past, or a memory. It seems to kick-start a process which then goes on to create a powerful sense of perspective and you end up feeling lost in a long line of thought which makes you feel completely insignificant.

When I was just a kid I used to jump out of my bedroom window at 6.00am (it was easier than crossing all the house to get to the back door) to go running. Sometimes I was sleepless, having spent the night watching TV or reading and by then I would be tired but the body I lived in would still work and I would force it to go through the grueling pace of a morning 6km run.

I used to think then of surviving. How life would by the time I reached my thirties, have given me all the answers. It’s been a while since I was thirty and I know there are no answers. Just questions.

We get up and go through each day somehow telling ourselves that everything is ok, that the world spins the way it should. But you know, it isn’t, and I’ll tell you why. Had I been born in South Africa, Namibia, The Congo, life would have been much different for me now, even if the person inside my head was exactly the same.

It raises an interesting question about what it is that exactly makes us what we are. And it also makes me wonder if we are little more than the product of chance and chemical compounds. In which case the very fact that we can organize ourselves into swarming societies that take over entire areas and build cities has to be pretty amazing.

The though coloured my entire day and everything I did was either the result of instinct or circumstance. Makes you think sometimes.