Dé Luain, Aibreán 25, 2005

The right question to ask

(I started this before my last post)
After a brief hiatus I think I'm ready to write again. I could have writen last week, but the subjects seemed to be of a very personal nature, and as I once promised Bryan Young, I'm not going to write on those sorts of things. I do this both for my gain and your's. I don't want my overly personal details posted on the internet, and I'm sure that you don't want to read them.

So what do I write about? I thought about writing on the Phantom of the Opera and how his character is really one of the most lovable villains ever conceived. You really can't help but feel bad for him. But no not that.

I've actually been thinking a lot about a conversation I had with a very good friend of mine a little over a year ago. Through the course of the conversation, which I won't get into, we can to the point in decribing ourselves. I made some comment concerning "why not," and she stop and said, "That's the difference between us. You think in 'why not's' and I think in terms of 'why." I've thought about that a lot since that evening. At first I honestly took it as something that I was doing wrong, but I've come to realize the opposite. She was right, as she normally tends to be. I do think in terms of "why not." George Bernard Shaw wrote in his play "Back to Methuselah," "You see things; and you say 'why?' But I dream things and say, 'why not?" Now I'm not about to say that I'm more of a dreamer than my dear friend (I'm most certainly not), but I do dream differently. I argue here for my own sake, for my own piece of mind. There are times in our lives when the only reason for doing somthing is because I don't have a reason not to do it. You could argue then that this really is the reason why I do it, but thats not how I would term it. I do a decent amount of hiking and traveling, and I've done a lot of things. When you're standing on the banks of the Rio Frio in the semi-wilderness of the Dominican Republic you find the question rolling around in your mind. Not consciously, but it's still there. When you think back it's there, just before you leap its there. You don't have a reason to be there, there's no reason any one would ever want to leave the city, to leave society, to leave the thing's we know and go off into the wilderness. So you jump, not because you have a reason to, but because you don't. You don't have a reason to leap blindly into the freazing cold water, such an oddity in the tropical climate.

So what am I saying? Am I right or is my friend right? Personally, I think we're both right. Sometimes you need a dead on reason to do somthing, and other times...you just have to jump.

A.T.H.

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