While We Are Waiting…

…for something to happen. And don’t you also feel the world is on ‘Hold’ just now …as if someone pressed the ‘Pause’ button for all meaningful activity. Sorry to break your bubble if you think you have anything ‘meaningful’ to do – you don’t. There is nothing meaningful about anything that could be meaninglessly dispensed with, obliterated, made to not be, at any moment …and I don’t just mean by someone else pressing buttons (but that counts too). Meaningful things are meant to last, to make a difference – for more than a fleeting moment.

So why not do something meaningful that can’t be taken from you – unless your life is taken – your ability to think. Except that can be a dangerous activity in itself. All sorts of weird and strange ideas could arise in your mind (maybe that is why many folk have given up on thinking for themselves), or perhaps what is worse – maybe nothing arises. Some folk do that on purpose but what could be more meaningless than trying to think of nothing. Only, sometimes it is good to be able to empty the mind of endless and pointless chatter, especially when that chatter is exacerbated by additional endless and pointless chatter from external sources like radio and television, or, heaven forbid, ‘Podcasts’. But emptying is good only to purposefully fill the mind through directed thinking. And there is no better way to ensure you are fully engaged with directed thinking than by – drum roll – ‘Reading’.

I read this today, as an example…

“I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.” ―William Hope Hodgson

Schettler, John. Queen’s Gambit (p. 142). The Writing Shop Press. Kindle Edition.

How’s that for meaningful directed thought? The quote I mean, not the book it was quoted in – which just happens to be volume 61, which I am currently reading, of the 63 volumes of Schettler’s ‘Kirov Series’ involving the adventures of the crew of a time travelling Russian naval Battle-Cruiser. I have to say that of all the books I have read, this series has kept my attention throughout – the most unbelievable and disappointing parts not being the time travel episodes, explanations and reasonings, but the author’s extremely biased various accounts of different WWIIIs, fictionally and unrealistically based on western war-gaming software, to be at times sickenly unreadable. But I didn’t let that stop me from enjoying the series as a whole, with the final chapters and two more volumes still on my list to read. Some fascinating mind journeys and historical references to leading figures and recorded events in various epochs there.

Those things and the whole gamut of lived and unlived experience are only available to us through reading. So – read. Please. But also exercise some discernment in what material you read. There is just as much dross to be found there as in every other activity or human endeavour today – perhaps more than in most – because those who seek to influence for dishonourable purposes and who have already toxically infected the world of sound and music, are working on the same lines in the sensory world of sight, knowing full well the power of reading to open and liberate the mind.