balancing

 

There were many things I wanted to do this week, outings, odd jobs around the house and garden, a spectacular walk down a deep ravine on the other side of the river but by Tuesday evening, after I finally got my fully repaired bicycle back (it was like greeting a long lost friend) it became apparent that reality doesn’t need me to help operate it. It gets along just fine without my input and as the almost forgotten but most familiar first waves of vertigo began to wash over me, I had to realise that life right now is not going to be my problem to be solved. And so to bed and much sleep and drowsy days struggling with balance.

 

The positive aspect, much appreciated, is that being retired, I don't have to crawl to a doctor to get a sick certificate which then has to be sent to the employer in order to get paid while recovering. 

 

By the end of day two, I was back sitting upright and reading wonderous stuff.

 

Like this:

    I was wondering about the pyramids in Egypt. Why are there three pyramids?  . . . And I didn’t know very much about it, but . . .  I made this thought experiment: I would bet that they were not built like one pyramid, and then 500 years later, another pyramid. I bet it was just one crazy period when they made these three pyramids, because it’s not possible to build one pyramid. If you’re going to build one pyramid and have 40,000 people build a pyramid for forty years, you don’t stop doing that. You don’t just say, “Thank you, you can go home now,” because if you are building a pyramid with 40,000 people, for forty years, that’s what your economy is about. It’s about building pyramids.

    You have, suddenly, generations, because people lived a shorter life then. So suddenly you have two or three generations that don’t remember anything other than working on this pyramid, and the whole supply chain of your country is about making the ropes, cutting the stones—the whole hierarchy of the society is about where you are in building the pyramid, from the chief architect, to the lowest slave, to the people supplying this structure. If you stop building a pyramid, you have chaos. If you just say, “Go home now.” You don’t tell people just to go home and do something, because they have been used to having an assigned job for forty years. They’ll ask, “What do I do now?” Naturally, they start building another pyramid, because that’s the only way to keep the society and the structure whole, and after eighty years, nobody even has the idea that there should not be another pyramid. It’s just a question of how much bigger the pyramid should be, so it’s not until they have built the third pyramid that some people start scratching their heads, like OK, so we’re going to build a fourth? A fifth? Can this go on like this?

    And they hear rumors from Greece where not everyone is a slave, just every other person is a slave. And they have these amphitheaters, and they watch tragedies, so they get this news about alternative ways of life. Then I looked into the archaeology research, and it was actually true. The pyramids, the Great Giza Pyramids, were built in a crazy span of 120 years, and I think that now, with the climate strikes, that we finally have a generation that is seriously questioning.

    They don’t want to build pyramids anymore, and they don’t see the sense of it, and they don’t understand, why am I toiling my whole life, dragging myself to some job, just to have this metal case around me that we call cars? Why are we putting all these resources into these roads, and highways, and these ramps, and all this? They’re questioning everything, the foundations of what we are doing and why we’re doing it, because they see the damage of it, so I think that this generation that is now climate striking will bring the change on a much faster level than we’ve seen before, that is, change in how we eat and how we dress. Their dreams will be different from the dreams that we had, because their dreams are against a real threat.

 Andri Snær Magnason