I click on the ‘add new post’ button and a blank page opens, with the blinking cursor sitting in the ‘Title’ box.
The word ‘confluence’ pops into my mind, so I type it in, then quickly check the dictionary definition to make sure it’s the right word for what I want to say.
A title is important. It helps synthesise our ideas in a way that suggests there’s a core idea the author wants to communicate and the author knows, at the start of the writing process, what that idea is.
Sometimes when I start writing a blog post I have no idea of the core idea I want to communicate, and so I leave the title blank. The act of writing helps distill my idea and it’s at that point a title emerges.
But not this time. In this moment, as I sit writing, I know the core idea I want to communicate and so the title is easy. Plus, I’ve been thinking about this for over a week now and that thinking has acted as a distillery.
Over a week ago I saw this on my Facebook feed.
I remember being struck by the sentiment because we mostly hear ‘you only live once’ as an exhortation to make the most of things.
I’m currently, with lots of support from others, developing an ethics unit and am constantly on the lookout for case studies, resources, stories of ethical misconduct in the financial services sector (which is not hard to find at the moment), but when you search online for something, you enter into a rabbit warren of ideas and perspectives and views and things the internet believes you might be interested in.
One of those things was an interview Charles Wooley did earlier this year for 60 Minutes. I don’t ever watch 60 Minutes, but on this occasion, when the video was in my ‘Up next’ menu in YouTube, I decided to watch it because I was interested in who Charles Wooley was interviewing: Ricky Gervais.
The interview opened with them both walking through a cemetery and at one point, Gervais says something like, “you don’t exist for billions of years, and then for 70 or 80 years you do, and then you don’t”.
It’s a cosmic view of life – a long-range look – one that perhaps brings a different perspective to our lives.
And as I sat thinking about his comment, Carl Sagan’s video ‘Pale Blue Dot’ sprang into my mind.
Consider that dot … on it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. ~ Carl Sagan
I could feel the confluence starting – ideas beginning to merge.
The idea that we don’t only live once, we live every day of our lives.
The idea that we’re here for such a small part of all time.
The idea that we’re all together, on this one tiny planet.
How am I living each day? How am I making the most of the opportunities my being here allows? How am I caring for others and for the only planet we can currently call home?
I don’t have answers; I rarely do.
But the questions are a starting point.
A confluence has to start somewhere and it may as well be here, as I sit, musing from the cold.
Musings from the cold 