Was going to blog about other things then changed my mind and decided to give you a picture of thinking, and a thought I've been thinking.

It's interesting the thoughts that a death creates. Sort of burns a new set of neural patterns into the head that alter everything, sending old predictable thoughts in entirely new and surprising direction.

brane

Thinking

When looked at from a distance, a life often seems like an unsolvable puzzle that can only be worked out in retrospect. Like, we live relentlessly forward, pushing our way through a ceaseless hail of the new, most of which seems totally chaotic.

And all the while we have very little idea of what’s going on until we stop to look back.

It’s only in this process of review that we can clearly identify the sequences of cause and effect that lead us here, to this point. We look back and see a coherent stream of events that give our life sense and we draw solace from that. We draw solace from the knowledge that at least now we can identify why things happened the way they did - and that makes life seem to make sense I suppose. In remembering we’re able to imbue our life with the logic we require of it. After all, we have a brain whose intrinsic nature is to make patterns.

But really, this sense of logic we get from retrospect, is illusory. Any path we took would make sense when looking back at our footprints. It's just that, in looking back, we forget that each step we took was taken in the dark - not knowing what was going to happen, or what coincidences might arise from what we were about to do.

The future is chaos, the past makes sense, because we give it sense.

But regardless of whether the sense we make of life is actual or illusory, perhaps it is the only reward of growing old. The closer we get to death, life seems to make more sense simply because their is more of the logical past, and less of the chaotic future. With only the past stretching back behind us, life finally begins to sit nicely within the neural patterns of the brain ... and it all begins to make sense.

Perhaps it’s this quality that makes old age a wonderful reward - the prize at the end of the long obstacle course we run in the dark, when we finally give up the struggle to understand why we live.

Sorry about these maudlin thoughts ... (actually, that should be morbid thoughts) ... I'll spark up in a while ...