Looking outside my window as the day draws towards its close, I can see the trees in the yard across the street standing nightly, unmoving, as the world about them changes. Just farther down the street, and around the corner to the left, is an existing home scheduled to be torn down and replaced with four anaemic "executive townhouses" which amount to little more than row-homes with expensive trimmings. It perplexes me to consider the type of person who would spend upwards of $700 000 to purchase one of these, when they might get a nice little piece of property in the downtown for a similar price. The individual lots will not be at traditional right-angles to the road in order to square-peg-round-hole all four in to place, the effect of which will no doubt appear to have been intended by an epileptic in the midst of a fit, the drawings snatched away from her to be rushed downtown to the city ordinance office where it will be crudely rubber-stamped by a kick-back pocketing peon of no worthwhile description; and what shall happen to those large red maples that adorn the lawn? Naturally they will be removed to serve the cause of progress, and be replaced with wheedling saplings whose tenuous futures will depend on just how harsh a winter we encounter as they do one careful waterings. I am no less guilty than the parties-to-be, as I too have purchased a house built on the ghost of an older. To be sure, I feel marginally less guilty because I don't know what this lot used to look like. Perhaps it was a dump. Perhaps the old fellow who lived here last had let it go so that the shrubbery was ant-eaten and decrepitly leaning heavily to one side, while the rats and raccoons scurried about underneath the lifted up wainscoting; this is a rather fanciful, and certainly false view. What is more likely is that the entire lot was well maintained and let to grow as wild as neighbourly appropriate.
I have temporarily lost the aim of my argument. What I meant to say is that those trees have no idea what is in store for them. It may confidently be said that few biological forms have any idea what is in store for them, for they have little ability to foresee the future, though they doubtless have memory. The thick nimbostratus clouds plod sadly across the sky, as though on their way to some unpleasant, but ineluctable rendezvous. They radiate melancholy like the sun radiates promise, and lend a deranged yellow tint to everything they catch in their umbra. The trees do not appreciate this sense of foreboding, like palpable gloom reaching out ever farther for something to take hold of, yet, ever over-reaching. To go over one must go under. To surmount ones challenges, one must submit to their demands. One cannot forever subvert the dictates of cause and effect, of action and reaction, of consumption and consequence; riding a motorcycle with your mouth open is bound to choke you on flies, and ignoring the consequences of your actions, failing to predict the outcome of your choices, is tantamount to running around blindly at the rim of the Grand Canyon while some German screams, "now ... jamp!"
I cannot count the hours lost to mindless activity, nor the hours lost to mindful activity. What proof have we that any one thing, or other, has benefited or maligned us in some way that might not have been just as effectively achieved through other means? Chance is an unavoidable fact of living, nay, of existence, whether biological or mineral, so long as it is nominally existential. People "of faith" don't have to worry about chance because the dice are loaded, and they're as sure of the hand throwing them, as they are of their own existence. Chance. We make plans for futures that may never come. We take thousands of probable outcomes and boil them down to either the most desirable, or the most feared, and from their we have our lot cast based on intention and circumstance. We sit and watch the numbers of the stock market wax and wane like a drunken moon, and still con ourselves into certain belief that we are equal to the challenge of predicting them, that we are, in effect, masters of some fate: ours, their's, the poor fellow in the cubicle over there. Stick man drawings are no less meaningful than full detail anatomical ones, so long as the purpose and perspective is right. I wish I could learn to take nothing for granted, to enjoy what graces chance and life have seen fit to drop from their tables, like brushed-off scraps of after-dinner waste. I wish I could find the wonder again in a grain of sand, all of those basic atomic particles swarming around in probabilistic ways, with an in-built cloaking device that no amount of human cunning can ever penetrate. I want to walk on open air with the confidence of an idiot. I want very much, not to expect less of, but to gladly accept what people can offer me, to be less judging and more uplifting. I want, in essence, to be that queer mix of existentialist and spiritualist that very few have achieved, but to whom we owe much to the elevation of a, otherwise, base expectation of man's abilities.
The sky has grown dark as the earth has completed another diurnal phase. The trees stand as silent and unknowing as ever, and I pause to reflect and calm myself down a little. Too much expectation is like too much good wine: it feels good, but it can leave you with a paralysing hangover.
