These Four Walls

I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks. I realise I tend to think a lot more when I am unhappy.

I also realise I don't have to be happy all the time. In other words, I really don't mind being unhappy.

I may be unhappy, but I am contented. Being unhappy allows me to re-examine my life and my choices.. I like to think that it sometimes leads me to explore beyond my 'wall'.

Times like this.. what is supposedly real makes little sense to me. Money, Politics, Economics.. All these 'man-made' concepts make little sense to me. Why are we concerned about owning more things? Why are we so concerned about marking our territory- as if we could ever own mother nature?

I used to think that the sciences, law, business and accounting were 'real' subjects while 'art and music' served little purpose. It took me almost 15 years to realise how wrong I have been.

This again reminds me of an excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert's 'Eat, Pray, Love':-

'... Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated, and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe.

This is why Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors... In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes, the meal is the only currency that is real.

To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business- not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into..rhetoric and plot."