THINGS

This was written on the first day of this year. Yep, that's how long its been since I've posted something! So enjoy... and I hope you will do some serious thinking too.
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On New Year’s Day a TV channel is showing a re-run of that fat, ugly American’s documentary film that pays sneaky homage to outrageousness. A date in history, in its reversed US form, whose numerals share similarities with temperature measured in Fahrenheit is offered to us as a burning topic for a new year that is yet to recover from a tsunami and American colonialism in Iraq. I’m sure we can look forward to the fat man’s take on that as well.

Things are everywhere. They tempt as objects of desire; as must-haves; as odes to disposable incomes; as the fruits of a surging economy. Things are wanton in the flaunting of their beauty, their cutting-edge technology, their colours, styles and patterns. Things project the exuberance of youth; add fuel to an already overwhelming desire among the older-aged to revert to a younger time that seemed to have slipped by unnoticed, unexplored.

Things have human form too. Things that grab single, lonely people to dream of future companionship and perhaps just physical comfort currently deprived of. Beautiful young things dressed to please with their sculpted bodies, armoured in a sheen of glamour, in their minor celebrity status, wanting to be more revered occasionally than the front-page mentions.

There are things that a rare but growing section of the urban, urbane population also wants. The things that allow one to devote to a common cause; to commit to a social concern; to return to one’s roots; to nature; to life perceived as simple because it entails taking up residence in villages and farms, as compared to life in an urban setting. Things desired to help escape from other contrary things.

Things are everywhere. We wallow in their desirability; the secret promises they hold, their perceived assurances. And we create these things. Often such things beget other things, so with one thing obtained it needs to be complemented with another, requiring the support of a third, the balancing out of it with a fourth, until the breeding of want is insatiable, and prurient desire overtakes all our senses.

We want a happy new year, a prosperous new year. A new year better than the one before, better than the all that have passed. We want a new year that will give us health, wealth, love, joy, music, success. We want all we can get. Desire and its consequent fulfilment of want is of prime concern.

Perhaps, one day, a new year will come without our wanting it, or anything that is contained in it.

And that day we may also acknowledge in all honesty, the one thing we do not want, the one thing we all most want to avoid, delay, and deter; yet the one thing completely inevitable: death – is the one thing we can never do without.