(A final reflection upon my now forever passed Neptune square: the 5th application began separating some 72 hours ago. It has been wholly enlightening, and at times profoundly disconcerting.)
One of the most challenging scenarios in life is to find that you are no longer sure why you are here. On a very specific level, you can make all sorts of observations about existential definitions of purpose and ultimately, they must remain unverbalised, or you risk a very real diminution in the eyes of your closest allies that is the inevitable conclusion of allowing yourself to appear to be so implausibly adolescent in your views. There is nothing remotely naive about adolescence of course, but we make it that way because the alternative is almost heinous; that our adultness is an ever-strengthening lens that distorts reality until we possess only an entirely abstract understanding of our place within the Universe. Like all constructs of the human mind (and the logic within that observation is more than ironically self-referential) it posits the possibility that all we have managed with our allotted span is to rationalise our increasingly tragic and desperate descent into madness and propped it up into a state of prominence with Saturnine epithets of maturity, responsibility and practicality. Like a statue of Abraham Lincoln.
I almost envy those who can accept the world prima facie; and have no needs beyond the mundanely relevant and the beautiful, but such a state of introspective equilibrium is rather dependent upon a condition approaching egoless equanimity, or the more likely alternative that life is good and that it remains so. I believe that is the wisdom of crocodiles; which self-evidently is astonishingly relevant to crocodiles.
For me, I have to accept that the maelstrom in my heart that is threatening to overwhelm my personality – not consistently, but on occasion – has a real and true purpose and if that makes me appear ridiculous then it is only so because it is so unfashionable, because we cannot all be crocodiles. If that were even possible – never mind laudable – then the crocodiles would very quickly be forced to turn on each other or starve.
Oh wait…
We are born perfect and then adultness chips away the pieces of perfection and replaces it with cynism and mundanity.
And that’s what the moomin philosophy is all about! Preserving the child in you and refusing mundanity! 🙂