To What End (Revisiting)
3rd August 2023

I have a sensation of sitting here as a survivor, drinking a coffee that would not otherwise have been made; barista’d, poured into a paper cup, and consumed.

A little lessening of the human footprint on the earth maybe …definitely.

All of the bigger things like that seem not to matter so much all of a sudden sitting here. Climate change and global challenges, life outcomes, the do’s and don’ts, happenings, non-happening’s.

Space shrinks to be just me, and my trail, thin and inconsequential but all the same, nevertheless, …me.

My feelings, that of the warm coffee on the roof of my mouth, my swallowing, and my knowing of it, me.

There is a lot of time and distance between then and now. What a path that trail has taken and yet, still so small, and so, so thin …it asks me, what does it all matter?

I’m sure it does in the ways of this world, in the many things and people touched and affected in that space (between the then and the now).

But still, …so, so, small, and thin, and winding. What it really matters is hard to say, probably because I know at this level …it doesn’t …not really.

Pain, loss, heartache, wins and gains; the winding happiness and sadness, they are all the same. Swirlings in shallow tidal waters, back and forth, and around …and then forgotten.

So now …now it is time for me to close my eyes again, and to descend back to that other world, and pretend again that it does matter.

In doing so I close my eyes to the larger truth, because that is not our truth, our truth is the minutiae. That is the world in which we find ourselves dwelling and to living, feeling the ups and downs, crying and laughing, like they do, like all of this minutiae matters…

To what end, I know not.

Having said that, and in the face of the lack of answers around that ultimate truth, I glance outside my car windscreen and see a broad jetstream of swept cloud, high in a cold pale blue sky.

And I know that the memory of this moment will stay with me, to be prompted for recall by seeing future such skies,

…and I am grateful at least, for the perspective.

Inspiration: A visit to Alfred Hospital ICU, and a coffee and take away meal in the cafeteria, twenty two years almost to the day after my accident (and being admitted here).

Great Wall,
Simitai,
China.