The classic question

It's funny reading about the economic prognosis regarding the plunge in share prices and the realignment of China from a predominantly export, investment led economy to one more attuned to supplying an internal domestic market and the ramifications this has on the rest of the world. Is this the start of another seismic event such as the banking crisis of 2008 or will it be more benign and settled by accommodation within the global economy. 

What is funny is that at some stage I will not be around to see !! 

CNNs daily hyper screaming show, based on the New York Stock Exchange will be out of sight and my trip into M&S to buy trousers will be lost for ever in the year end accounts.

The world without me will go on as if I hadn't been an active participant, as if my blogs and the debates, the heat and the frustration were spent for nothing. Of course in the general scheme of things this is true. But in the enclosed pressure system which is 'me', the highs and the lows that make up my week, are the treasure I leave behind as a memory for a few close friends. 

It was Thomas Paine who said " The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark", and "to argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason and who's philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead or endeavouring to convert an atheist by scripture". 

He also said" Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another and it becomes my duty to 'guarantee', as well as to 'possess", or "What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly.

This stepping off the ship in full voyage and watching the ship steam away with its lights twinkling and the band still playing, and Número uno missing as if he had not existed, is a bitter pill to swallow. 

The environment in which we live and breathe , so interesting and sensible as we search for understanding through the mysteries of the quantum world or, the tracts of an ancient prophet/philosopher such as the Buddha. But it is all "Impermanent", it has no meaning other than a 'comfort blanket, to keep us psychological lay warm. 
"To be or not to be that is the question" ? Shakespeare  summed it up as always "whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune  or to take alms against a sea of trouble and by opposing end them. To die, to sleep no more and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache  and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die. To sleep.

And so the soliloquy rolls on with all the gift of the Bards genius to grasp that human intercourse which conflicts us all as we seek meaning in this life.
I find it fascinating, not at all depressing. A wonderful example of man's indomitable spirit to press on regardless because of a lack of any sensible alternative !!