Thursday 23 June 2011

Imagination and its allure...

Life, the second biggest mystery after death itself. What is life? How have we come into being?

What is our true purpose? Are we alone in this Universe? All these and many more questions. I know that I am not the only one to ask them. Hundreds of thousands of people have asked these same questions for millennia, speculating, deliberating, dreaming and imagining the endless possibilities that our Universe has to offer. Yet despite all this research and investigation into these basic questions, we have no resolution or answer!

Death worries me, because I have no idea what follows it. Will all of what I am now simply cease to be?! Will my thoughts and feelings, my dreams and knowledge just disappear?!

Recently I have been seeing my Gran (Blackwell) on my Fathers side suffering from Alzheimer's. Her body withering as age sets upon her. It saddens me so. The matriarch of the family is slowly diminishing leaving my Auntie and my Father as heirs to the Blackwell name. My Gran (Wood) on my Mother's side is also getting older and the years are taking their toll although not yet to the same degree. But this saddens me too. Alas, with my Mother's Mum, I get to see her very rarely and unfortunately have missed the 2 last visits she has made to our home. This must be rectified.

But despite knowing that death faces us all, it makes it no easier for me to accept that one day in the not too distant future, my Gran's will pass away. And in the bleakness that stretches before me, I can see death will come to everything that I love and care for. My family, my friends, pets and famous faces. Even material objects have their time limit. My new favourite saying of late has been this, "Nothing lasts forever". And neither will I!

And so to combat this bleak outlook I dream of a world where I know the answers, where I can be everything I have ever wanted to be. Still as a 29 year old man, I dream of disappearing into the films and movies I watch and the books I read. I dream of riding the light cycles in Tron, fighting aliens and dodging high energy blasts from the Predators shoulder cannon. I dream of meeting the perfect woman, beautiful and flawless, our romance laid out as though drawn from the most perfect moment. I see myself as a Viking crusading across the Danelands.
But yet I know this cannot happen! I let my mind wander these paths so often that when reality comes a knocking at my door, I get angered by it, feeling resentment that I cannot become that which I yearn to be, stepping outside my reality and disappearing into the adventures and worlds of others.

Is this chaos? Is this lunacy? Or I am using these visual and audible adventures as an escape from a reality that at the moment I have limited desire to be part of!?!

But do not get me wrong. I love what I have in life and in comparison to others, I must be so thankful for all that is. Family, Friends, Love, Laughter and Life! I am a lucky man to have all of this.

Yet still my mind seeks an alternative. I am constantly infatuated with movies. The simple idea that the characters in these films can escape what we all must face and detach themselves from reality!

Well this just opens a big envious hole in me and through this hole I let my imagination drift into the fathoms that the movies psychology eludes before my mind, allowing my own mind to wander aimlessly into nothingness and thus in turn detaching me ever more from the realism that I inevitably must return to once my brief trip away from normality breaks down and everyday life returns kicking and screaming.

I long for an escape from life, yet death is not the option I seek. I wish to fly in the clouds above the sky, I wish to swim the seven seas. I want for everyone to be with me yet I search for emptiness and seclusion. I like my imagination, for with him, I can touch the stars, no one ever dies and I don't have to face the harshness that us humans have turned our existances in to!

Life should be more than this!