- Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar on final approach. Requesting instructions for runway heading.
- Tower, Victor Hotel Oscar Mike, we have that as runway two niner. Descending to five thousand. We are as true as an arrow and are about to make our final descent.
- Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar congratulating ourselves on buttering the bread and we thank you for your assistance. We read Bravo three off the active and Bravo, Golf, Hotel, to Gate Seven. Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar out.
Now that we've all returned to pretty much where we started a month ago, the question that I have as you have road tripped through my mind is, is it vastly different to yours? I think, without having played in yours, that the answer is so incredibly obvious that it is almost not worth asking the question.
I think that the landscape which makes up my mind, with large amounts of overly grandiose buildings and a perhaps daft sense of order, is more a product of nature rather than nurture. The raw materials which go together to make up a personality, I think are very much fixed before someone is born and to be perfectly frank, I do not think that I would have been vastly different had I been brought up in a different family.
I think that one of the unique hallmarks of life is its ability to think about itself. I have no doubt that my cats have their own ability to think about their own position in the world, though all evidence leads me to believe that they think that they are the most important things in it. Again we harken right back to the central problem of housing a mind within a brainbox within a bioelectromechanical meatbag.
We do not need to go through passport control with our luggage because for this whole entire trip, we have never left the country. When we step outside of the airport terminal there will not be that feeling of stepping out into a brave new world for me, as I already live here.
I am pretty used to living in the country of my mind. However, I suspect that many people who are in lockdown because of COVID-19 will find this awful. Just like the problem that whatever leaders a nation had before a crisis will be the ones who lead the nation into it, whatever challenges and issues that a person has before they go on holiday (including an enforced quarantine holiday) will be the ones they will take into it with them. That has very real and serious implications; especially surrounding domestic violence but also if that is not an issue, with the ongoing mental health of an individual.
Although I am hardly an authority on mental health issues, I will implore you that it is perfectly okay not to achieve very much at this time. It is perfectly acceptable to be sad and grieve the loss of a world which used to be. A mind which generates happiness from the trade of thoughts, ideas and companionship with other people which is suddenly starved of that, will naturally sense that something is wrong. I do not know how you can argue that that is not the case with the world at the moment. Not learning a skill, not getting loads of work done, and not being a hyper-productive dynamo, is acceptable and allowable. When uncertainty rains down, you are allowed to find shelter from the storm.
Be kind. Be silly. Be quiet. Be loud. Be sad. Be calm. Be worried. Be anxious. Be grateful Be all those things. Simply be.
Nobody else can own your response to this. To be fair, nobody else has the right to tell you that our response to all of this is wrong, either.
I'm going to leave after you've checked into the international terminal and flown off for some other country. Maybe you'd like to go for a road trip through your own mind, or perhaps through someone else's.
As for me, I get to back to work at the word wrangling ranch. These words ain't gonna wrangle themselves.
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