Morning Thought

Every morning while luxuriating in the incredible privilege of having heated water running over my body, a "thought" enters my mind. It generally crystalises enough to enable me to capture it. For we all know how many thoughts, ideas, concepts, are like wisps, misty fingers almost touching for a moment, like the promise of a caress - for a moment there, and then gone... forever. Whereas our feelings are more like that of reacting to the touch of someone - whether liked or not, attractive or not, allowed or not.

What is a thought anyways? How do we even manage to think thoughts? Even dreaming up such a mechanism is amazing. Scientists spend their time collecting data, and trying to find the "thing" that thinks. Is it the brain, or the electrical synapses? Those that delve into such things are becoming quite esoteric, talking about Bose-Einstein condensates, and other such amazing concepts to try and explain this incredible event.

The outstanding event is not that we think at all - for we assume that many more evolved animals both on sea and on land, are able to think. Even, perhaps, the awareness that we think, and exist, might not be special, for animals might be able to do that too.

No... the actual element that differentiates us, is not that we think, or are aware that we exist, but of death, and the time that stretches from your birth to your death. (tombstone with date picture). That time in which we create a narrative that runs parallel with your actual life, and has a big part in determining who you will be (if a youth) and who you are (once mature).

This morning my thoughts were around the Covid-19 pandemic raging in this time as I was considering a journey to the closest major city - East London. The images of entering this world of masks and crazy responses to the spread of a flu flitted through my mind. Imaging interacting with this world, and like a worm retreating from an unpleasantness, so I felt myself retracting. As long as I can keep away from the Covid-19 infection, I will. And it is not the virus I am afraid of, but the people's reaction to the threat of viral infection is scaring me. It has that brutish, reactive, thoughtless feeling like a mob preparing for a rampage. At this point, it is still just small breakouts, like little flames. The conflagration is yet to come.

What if we declared a Covid free zone where we lived? I mean, one in which we just live normally, and accept the fact that we have a flu moving through our village, and it may infect a certain number of people, and some may even die. But we need to deal with those who are in need, and the rest of us need to continue living our lives and supporting and sustaining one another.

For I can promise you one thing, that the aftermath of this pandemic will be catastrophic. We can already see that the world we will emerge into, will not be the same as the one we have left behind. Even if it is only with masks, and disinfectant, and plastic shields, that we will be living with now, that will not be what the "end game" will be. With the amount of power politics in the world. With men (and women) with egos massive enough to believe that they can make rational decision for millions  - an absurdity which we have bought into as well as we continue to vote for people to hold such positions of power over us.


Either we believe that our government and governing bodies have the ability to sort out this mess, or we don't. If the former, then wait and see. If the latter, then we need to get off our butts and start organising ourselves out of this mess before it is too late - otherwise we are going to descend into the same sort of quagmire as Zimbabwe - an economic mess with a dictatorial overlords ruling over everyone and luxuriating in the spoils of their lifestyles.

I did not think it was going to end up here, but once again, my call is to organise ourselves into a self-sustaining network of communities.  Let's call it the Tree of Life Network.