tea – Observations and Misunderstandings

I may have just done something stupid. This whole doing exercise outside while it’s sunny thing has taken a hold of me and I agreed to go on a 5k run. Five thousand metres. Not something to be scoffed at. I managed three thousand last week but my knee started hurting at the end so I’m fearing the same may happen today. This time I suspect my rather unsympathetic friend may not pander to my excuses and the abuse will flow. While this is nothing new I am exposing myself enough that something is making me feel wary at the prospect of what’s to come.

But this is all part of this new healthy and energised human being I’m attempting to create. I am in my mid-30s now which is the usual time people have breakdowns and decide it’s time to exercise. And I thought I was unique. I even had a dream last night about eating too many of these pizzas we’re making and getting fat. It wasn’t exactly deep in the subconscious but that’s a fear I can’t deny to myself any longer. My belly was so fat, I can’t possible think how many pizzas I had been eating.

How much of this then is me being vain? I won’t deny there was an aesthetic element involved in the horror I felt at the enormity of my gut but I’m sure I had convinced myself previously it was all health related. The subconscious never lies though. Saying that we do start to become more aware of the aches and pains that once either didn’t exist or only existed for a short period. Now they feel like they never go away. The desire for life must be so strong in people who reach serious old age. My god everything must just hurt endlessly.

I’m supposed to be running in about half and hour and I feel so full of sandwich and the cup of tea I’m currently drinking. I’m going to do a little yoga as a warm up of sorts and crack on. I’ll report back when it’s all over.

Huh huh…huh huh…huh huh…collapse…

I was actually leading the way until about the three kilometre mark at which point I saw a waypoint in the distance and my body started to assume it was time to walk. I thought I felt a little wretch at four kilometres and by then my friend had caught up with me although saying that he had only been about five metres behind the whole time and I know that because I could hear him suffering too. We parted at the four kilometre mark and I struggled my way back and dragged myself over the finish line. It really was a battle of the mind. Having completed a few Vipassana courses in my time I can confirm the relation to meditation is an accurate one. My knees held strong though which was reassuring too. In short though; can taste blood. Tight muscles. Light head. Fucked.

A quick look back through the decades will bring up the most fascinating future predictions about the present. A quick look online gives a scary amount of reasonably accurate predictions. These predictions are never exactly spot on of course but the ideas are usually in the right area. The man flying with use of mechanic wings is the jetpack, bubble cars that we don’t need to manually operate are self-drive cars and the ‘correspondence cinema‘ is like a clunky version of Skype. We seem a long way from having our own helicopters, we haven’t mastered telepathy or transportation, machines have still not liberated the workforce, we haven’t made it to Mars in person, not everyone is vegetarian and we’ve certainly not invented time travel. Curiously Nikola Tesla predicted that by now we would have given up stimulants such as tea, coffee and tobacco because of their harmful affects on the human body. You try telling that to the advertising executives and watch them laugh in your face. 2020 is quite often the year many of these predictions were made for, just realise you’re right now living in someone else’s future that they could never possibly have imagined.

Predicting must be fun though. It’s a job which you can’t fail at as long as you make predictions far enough beyond what you imagine will be your lifetime. These end-of-the-world cult leaders could probably learn something from that as their predicted date comes and goes. It is not just the crazy fanatics and the futurists of the past that make predictions though, it is you, me and everyone else on a daily basis. It never seems quite clear why we seem so determined to prophesise prospective future events but we seem to have made such a past time of it that it can often take up a fairly unequal proportion of out time. It is possible that we are living such miserable lives that it is this looking ahead that gives us hope of a brighter future, or we live with our heads in the clouds to the point that we forget that we are unable to actually live in these fantasy worlds we create.

The reality from these past predictions is clearly that while you may be able to imagine something similar to what may happen, at no point will it be possible to accurately predict events to come. Nothing ever works out as you imagine. We forget to live in the actual moment to the point that were the future to happen exactly as we predicted we probably wouldn’t even notice anyway as we would already have moved on to the another future. Failing that we get so obsessed with how we want the future to unfold and become so attached to the image in our heads that we are inevitably disappointed with whatever outcome actually happens. We waste so much time, life passes us by with all this predicting. Then one day you’re old but you never noticed as you were never really there to see it happen.

Tag: tea

5k Challenge

An Obsessive Future Fly-By