25/11/07

So, I was waiting for a taxi last Sunday evening.

It was cold and windy and dark, and the queue was long. The lighting was that fluorescent orange colour that drains the life out of everything, and I was surrounded by all these industrial style pillars - all brickwork and girders, you know.

And I suddenly thought, this setting - the weather, the time, the place, the lighting - is very bleak and depressing. Which is strange, because I'm feeling fine.

Of course, it's not strange at all. Everyone knows it's not strange if your environment doesn't match your emotions. But I think it can be quite easy to forget. It's easy to forget that the sun doesn't shine more often when you're happy, that it doesn't rain harder when you're sad, that it's not colder when you're lonely. It's easy to forget that however you feel, the world is always the same.

Everyone is self-centred. That's not meant as an insult, it's just a fact. You can never see through anyone's eyes but your own. And also, you can't see everything around you. Or maybe you could, but you'd go crazy. Imagine if you had to see and process every single piece of imformation around you - you'd never do anything else.

So every day, you walk out into the world and you choose what to see - I will look at and remember this, I will ignore and forget that. And because the whole point is to avoid cluttering up the front of your brain with this information, then the choices have to be instinctive and emotional. Otherwise your brain would be running up to you while you were in the middle of something else, and saying things like 'so, are we going to notice that that old guy with the bad teeth is holding a red umbrella?'. Which would be annoying.

Instead of thinking about your choices, you simply make them based on how you're feeling, like picking out props for a play. Today I'm feeling bad, so I'll notice that dead fox lying by the side of the road. Today I'm feeling good, so I'll see that pattern of ivy climbing up the wall. But all those things are always there - the good and the bad. Not only that, but we're the ones who decide whether they're good or bad in the first place. As far as the world is concerned, they're just ... things.

I guess it's all pretty obvious really. It's not like you don't know already. But something about that taxi rank really made me think about it - it was so bleak, it could have been a film set for a dystopia. And the difference between the setting and my feelings was positively jarring.