Windblown...

As it turns out my life has ended up pretty much as I wanted it to, well apart from the good looks and fame. My hand writing is nice though and I have a new idea every six minutes exactly. I don’t bleat like a sheep either.

Of course to get here has not been without its trials, tribulations and sacrifices. But life without regret seems to me to probably be a life half -lived and I’m pretty sure that my life has been three-quarter lived at least - even if a quarter of it has been lived inside my head.

Yes, a new idea every six minutes, sometimes even more frequently than that. That's 180 ideas a day, more if you count the slightly weird ideas I have whilst I'm asleep. A few more if you count the even weirder ideas that pop into my head when I am dreaming.

Here’s one.

It seems that rather than me shaping my life, life has shaped me. I am the sum of all life has had to offer and thrown at me. I’m not even sure that I had much choice in a lot of it. Oh, I know that people say ‘it’s your choice’, but ultimately it often isn’t. There are so many factors that contribute to the things that we do and the decisions we make and ultimately – are we really making choices at all?

You go to a restaurant and you have a choice about what to eat, but it’s really just what’s on the menu. You don’t get a choice about whether you catch a cold; you either catch one or you don’t. You can go fishing but that doesn’t mean you will catch a fish, although every fisherman knows that he or she would choose to. I doubt that there are many people who would choose to be in an exploding building, or a car accident, or in that plane when the engines fail. But lots of people find themselves in that awful predicament.

Choice? I don’t think so. It’s the wind of life that shapes us. Sometimes a breeze, a zephyr, often a gust or a dust devil, occasionally even a hurricane, but no matter its force or even its direction there isn’t much we can do to stop it.