It's the last chance to do a WEEKEND ENGAGEMENT topic before I head off to Tassie, and I'm not likely to do one on the road (sorry @galenkp) so I thought I'd do all three! Are you read for my waffle? Here goes!
250 minutes
'Hi Mum, is Dad there?'
'Sure, let me just get him for you'.
That's pretty much how the conversation goes every time I call my parents. Poor Mum. I reallly am Daddy's girl. But if I'm going to die, it's him I'm calling. When he told me he had cancer I kinda went a little gooey. He hugged me then pushed me away, as he does (he's not a huggy man) and said 'River, you do yoga, you know what this is about'. Yep. Impermanence and all that. There'd be many conversations later - so many good ones that now he's got cancer again, we don't have to have them. You know, the 'was I a good parent/yes you were the best' kinda thing, and 'I wish I had have gone to Nepal/But Dad, you've had an awesome life' kinda thing.
Anyway, I'm calling Dad as he always has such a gentle, circumspect and philosophical way of looking at life and death. We get each other. He's not going to go to pieces on me.
'Hey Dad, I got my leg bitten off by a shark and I'm bleeding out'.
'Well, River, you do yoga, you know what it's all about. Just breath'.
Yes Dad.
Then I'm going to call my son and tell him how much I love him, and how proud I am of him, and probably cry and make a joke at the same time. I do love making him laugh. He's not very good at emotional things so it might go like this:
'Hey honey, I've just been disembowelled by a zombie'
'Oh, that's no good Mum' he'll say. Long awkward silence.
Of course, Jamie'll be with me, as he always is.
'Babe, I think I'm going to die very soon'.
'I wish I could die for you', he'll say. 'I love you more than all the ones.'. He's talking about all the woman he's been with. It's a running joke. He'll hold me in his arms and I'll melt. I'll smell his armpits for the last time and here him say 'I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you' and die happy.
Found $250
It's mine! All mine! I'm buying dinner at Ipsos in Lorne tonight! I love a good Greek meal. I'll probably invite my folks, as they haven't been out in ages. Or my sister and her husband. We'll drink wine and eat fried saganaki.
If I lost $250 I wouldn't even bother going to the authorities. I'd just swear a little but be happy for the person who found it.
However, chances are I'd probably go onto the Facebook community page of the town I found it in and say 'hey, found something valuable in town today - if you can message me with what it was, it's yours'. Only because that would be super cool if someone did that to me with my lost cash.
What goes around comes around.
What will life be like in 250 years?
I believe things can only get worse. History gives us a pretty good clue to to the future. The more we seem to advance, the further backward we slide. Technology made our lives better to a point - and you can't argue aspects of modern medicine like cancer treatment aren't awesome - but it's also ruining it. Social media has made us cling harder to our identities and polarise against the 'other' in echo chambers of anger and fear and it's made us navel gaze to the point we're scrolling more through the things we want to buy to become something we think will make us happy than actually doing the things that have the real potential to make us happy.
I'm in a little echo chamber of my own where I surround myself with people who do good things, in my view, like take care of the earth and plant vegetables and recycle. You could almost argue that the seed of humanity is cracking under pressure so that we can grow into something better, but outside my echo chamber I know the reality is different. Human beings are driven far more by greed and vanity than they are by compassion and altruism.
In 250 years, we're going to be living in the same dystopia we've always lived in. It'll just look a little different. We won't see night skies anymore, signalling the end of our ability to gaze and wonder at what is beyond our own belly button. I see a no man's land, the remnants of a war zone, skeloton trees and us living off cockroaches.
But maybe there will be pockets of paradise too, where there are no people at all, and the wildlife has come back, like it did during the height of the pandemic when the world entirely shut down. I love that idea. Humanity all but wiped out and the plants and animals coming back to regain a paradise. The earth healing itself. That's the best kind of utopia.
Dark? I suppose so. But tell me what signs there are that suggest otherwise? I need some hopium.
With Love,
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