Now what?

Well, the first working week of the year is done, and it wasn't that bad.  Unfortunately, this has led me into a false sense of security.  I thought I'd broken the back of the new year.  I was rudely disabused of this belief on Monday morning when I work up with a monumental gob on.

It's not even as though I've got much to bellyache about at present.  Work's ticking over; we've got some holidays booked and looming, and all is well.  However, it's the prospect of another year exactly like the last that's getting in amongst me.

That's the real catalyst of mid-life crises I think.  It's not grandiose, nihilistic notions of one's mortality; it's the realisation that all the great changes that happen to a rotter over the course of his allotted years are now very probably behind you.  It's going to be like this until...well, until it is no longer like this, if you know what I mean.  That's a sobering thought, eh?

Also, there doesn't appear to be any easy way out of the malaise.  On Saturday, I had an inkling there might be a fug on the horizon, so I thought I'd take myself off to London's fashionable west end and piss some money up the wall on unnecessary consumer durables.  But when I got there, I realised I couldn't be bothered with them.  Most men my age still get a minor frisson from buying toys, but I no longer do.  I've never been very materialistic I suppose.

I could take up a dangerous hobby - martial darts for example.  But it sounds like an awful lot of effort.  I'm not sure I could be bothered.

Mystical Hoo Hah

One of my neighbours is a avid practitioner of yoga, so much so in fact that she's training to become a teacher of that ancient and venerable art.  One assumes then that she must be quite good at it.  When not bending, stretching and contemplating, she is just your everyday London 30-something - i.e. likes a drink and a fag.  This dichotomy fascinates me.

I remember years ago, the husband of a friend of mine was something in the world of tai chi.  There was no apparent dichotomy in this chap.  He practised obsessively, ate nothing that he wasn't prepared to kill first himself (no, really), drank no alcohol and generally led the life of a trainee acetic.  He was very well regarded by the tai chi cognoscenti too.  There was talk of him being put forward if the old slow kung fu made it into The Oympics.  He was no slouch when it came to tai chiing then.  But there was a dichotomy when you got close enough to him: he was by far and away the most uptight human being I've ever met.  You could just feel the unease seeping out of him like sweat.

If he could become a master of tai chi, then all its claims to afford insight and calm to its adherents were clearly bullshit.  The truth of the matter is slightly more material and prosaic then the ancients would have us believe.  If you're born with some natural aptitude and practice hard enough, you'll get good.  You don't need to dismantle the ego and assume your place in the cosmic consciousness first either; you just need to get up early, put on a pair of jogging bottoms and get on with it.

This realisation was initially quite disspiriting for me.  They really doesn't appear to be anything beyond the objective material "out there" that our senses assure us exists.  Transcendence is very probably an accident of sentience, a result of neurons randomly firing-off, as many scientists also now believe dreams to be.  We used to ascribe great significance to dreams, didn't we?  But now most informed, rational observers of neural science agree that they almost certainly mean fuck-all.