Tag: ramble

A Ramble Through Little

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I was doing so well living the life of oblivious bliss. No news for ten days, suddenly the world felt like a beautiful place. When you have no idea what is going on outside of the bubble you live in on a daily basis then things can very easily start to appear relatively calm. It helps that the bubble is a small seaside village and despite peoples best attempts at creating them, there are few genuine regular issues worth being demoralised over. That doesn’t mean things don’t happen but certainly little worthy of national attention let alone global and geopolitical. Saying that in places like this all you have to do is scrape below the surface and you’ll find something worth getting carried away with. It does explain the propensity for gossip in places like this though.

It’s interesting to see how we respond to moments of drama. I know I could live in a small village and life would be relatively stress free, likely it would be safe and although there wouldn’t be many people around I would know enough of them to not experience loneliness. Living in a city is far more exciting, there are things to do, places and people to see and there would be enough action to absorb you attention as required. Life though would probably be more intense and potentially more stressful, also in my experience far more lonely than any small village I’ve ever lived in. I’ve never quite understood that, and suspect the lonely feeling in cities is something born out of not being brought up in one and knowing how really to exist within them.

Perhaps a balance between the two. Always a balance. Always a fence to sit on. A sleepy but interesting and cultured city beside the sea. That’s the dream. I imagine if that existed so many people would have moved there in search of it they would destroy it in the process. It’s like being a tourist and wanting to visit the idyllic spots and being oblivious to the fact your presence helps in destroying any sense of idyllic you once had. We just can win. But we should never give up. What kind of life would that be. Too busy, too noisy but never settle. Or does that just miss the point for acceptance and appreciating what you have. Perhaps that’s for another time when I fancy another little ramble. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.

A Ramble On Death

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I was watching a video this morning on Facebook, on what I can’t remember; a telling indictment of the zombie social media turns us into. I do remember at one point some footage came on of men in the First World War. It was coloured footage which I always find really fascinating because it makes old film real and relatable in a way black and white can’t be. The Great War was from a time past and those involved have all died now. I haven’t checked it but I seriously doubt there is anyone left. You know you’re looking at dead people, they’re younger than I am now, but there time has been and now they’re dead.

I’m not obsessed with death, it doesn’t fascinate me in some morbid way and I once used to dismiss it in that way people do when they’re young and like to pretend they don’t give a shit about anything. That doesn’t mean either that I’m about to tell you all I’m scared of death but I am trying to understand it. I am trying to understand it because it plays a huge part in our behaviours as a species. We’re aware consciously of our own existence and as a result our own deaths too. Are we alone in this awareness? One day all this is just not going to be there.

This idea of nothingness is hard to comprehend. Imagine you go to sleep and that feeling of deep sleep is what you will be experiencing for eternity, except you don’t experience deep sleep consciously, arguably we don’t even exist in those moments. How then can we imagine not existing. We try to imagine something we have little empirical understanding of and it’s impossible. This is almost scarier than death itself, which kind of isn’t scary at all.

These soldiers were living in their time. This is the thought that inspired me to start this ramble on death. Why do we fear getting old and dying. These people, that was there time and they lived it, they got old and were replaced by other people living their experience of time. This is my time now and I need to live it because one day I will have to let it go and I want to do it with a smile on my face, content. Not content that I lived life to the max or whatever slogan you can come up with, but just content in the knowledge that now my time is up and it’s time for others to take over. There are plenty out there who are like that and plenty who can’t let go. It’s fear ultimately. Fear of stepping into an unknown time in life, closer to the ultimate unknown. I’m just curious, if I’m lucky to live that long of course. And also, in a way, if we’re to understand death do we first need to understand life? Certainly there’s an order to these thing and maybe with some kind of understanding comes a form of acceptance. It’s especially interesting because, in a way, there are no answers and what’s more powerful than that.

A Disciplined Ramble

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Life is funny. Life is full of surprises. We think we have it all worked out and then something comes along to remind us we have no idea. We have no control. I have been criticised in the past for just going with what comes in front of me and forgetting everything else and in some ways there is validity in that. Living in the moment is great, being present is real but so are things that you can’t see. But then there is also a lot to be said about going with whatever twists and turns life’s rollercoaster throws at you. Part of that is embracing the good things that come up but with that we must also embrace the struggles. It may feel like what you are faced with, whatever daunting prospect you see blocking your way, is inhibiting you and preventing you from finding happiness but we never know what series of events will unfold because of it. Maybe, just maybe, something will come into our life that brings some happiness but that thing wouldn’t have had those more negative events first not come. It is important to remember this when we feel everything is lost. I could relate this to the virus, but I could very easily relate it to something else, or anything in fact. It’s just nice to discover something positive from events which haven’t turned out as we originally thought they might.

I haven’t re-read that but what a ramble I imagine it was. It’s been a long day and i’m already into the next. The early hours of the morning. This isn’t going to be a vintage piece and it’s another day of learning more about discipline. It’s genuinely interesting, for me at least, to see how natural and easy it is to write each day now. I’m so tired, it’s 2am and I really want to sleep but I’m here writing this. It can’t be that far off six months I’ve written every day. Every bloody day despite what has been going on around me. It might not always be exciting for you but fuck, it’s amazing what not wanting to have a public fail will force a person to do. What is interesting though is that I have seen changes in my daily approach to things. While I still have idle moments if I need to focus my energy on something undoubtedly I am far more capable of it that in the past. I genuinely think I have learnt and become a more disciplined man in my everyday life from this. From forcing myself to write no matter what. Habits are everything. Just imagine what kind of an enlightened being I’ll be in another six months. Look out world.

A

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A funny thing Football is. There’s a part of me that views it as my dirty little secret when I’m trying to pretend I’m some kind of intellectual cultured traveller. This is less of a thing these days but undeniably I barely talked football when I ran around as a little hippy activist back in the day. Seemingly the worlds we move in through life change, or a better word may be evolve, and if we’re making the effort to live life not necessarily to the full, but realistically at atleast seventy to eighty percent then it’s not unreasonable to imagine we move throughout a few worlds within our lifetimes.

I wonder if it’s even possible to fully know the world you’re currently inhabiting. Maybe that’s also a ridiculous statement as its probably quite obvious sometimes, but more that if you’re experiencing life in a way in which you’re not thinking too much about who you are or your image within such a world then there’s a chance you just exist. It could be a case of embracing and being true to the moment or some such thing.

I just re-read that last paragraph and now might be a good time to mention I’m struggling with an horrendous hangover, rambling mindlessly without any kind of point in sight. In regards to my ability to write with a stinker of a hangover though I think I have improved from my last effort about a month ago when it took me about three days to write anything coherent again and even then coherent may be a little generous. That’s one of the things this blog is though, some self indulgent observations of course, but for a large chunk it was and still is about the experiment of writing for a year everyday and what that means in various real situations. This hangover while driving back to Scotland is very much then another real situation in which I attempt to write something you may actually want to read. Saying all that, it’s probably not the most interesting thing I’ll ever write.

I’m on the boat across the Irish Sea at the moment, just watched some film about bird watchers. It was alright but I can see why I’ve never heard of it before. The point being though that they found themselves in Alaska at one point and I remembered how much I want to sail around some crazy remote northern or southern areas. I nearly went on a trip last year to Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America with this crazy eighty old Alaskan. In the end I dropped out because his engine looked a long way from ever working and he talked too much. Antarctica, Alaska, the Arctic…all the best places seem to begin with an A

Tomorrow

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

The challenge of an experiment or a learning experience, or whatever is best to describe my attempts at learning discipline and practising writing at the same time, is that there will be days when nothing really comes to mind about what to talk about. There is a list of things written down in a notebook somewhere, a notebook unfortunately out of reach in the next room, on various topics that could be worth writing about. This list was written down about six months ago though when the idea of writing this first arose and bar What would Henry Rollins do no other topic on the list comes to mind. That is however not the point because so far nothing that I have written about has been from any list or pre planned. That may be pretty obvious, mostly each piece seems off the cuff and I have preferred that to planning as seeing something evolve organically is enjoyable, and let’s be honest having a little ramble for four hundred words is far less effort than writing about a particular topic.

Do people enjoy reading a little ramble that’s the thing. There are plenty of blogs, opinion pieces or editorials in which if you look carefully it is pretty clear they’re not much other than a little ramble dressed up as serious journalism. Todays piece certainly doesn’t even reach those levels as it threatens to drift off to sleep in the gutters of nothingness but that doesn’t mean it’s existence has no value. We never know what is born out of any event, cause and effect if you will, it isn’t alway the moments which appear great that holds a true sense of enormity in a lasting sense. Sometimes things are born out of the most inconspicuous of events and this may just be one of them. It equally may not, that is for future us to discover. What is clear though is that if every moment has the possibility of creating something whose significance is not immediately obvious, then we should not dismiss any moment. Another way of putting that is that we could attempt to be conscious of all we do at all times. Be the Buddha, be enlightened he says, be human also but don’t dismiss something because on first glance it appears to hold no immediate value. Today though, the task of rambling with an obvious conclusion is complete, but we never know what tomorrow will bring.