The Spin of the Ball

Pretending: “How are you?” I ask myself. The answer is always, “I don’t know”. There are few things that offer more relief than admitting, “I don’t know”. If I try to make up an answer like “good” or “not great”, I get an uneasy feeling, as though I’m lying. How could I possibly know how I am? So I say I don’t know. But it’s nice to be asked.

“How are you?”

“I don’t know, thanks for asking.”

If a person asks me at a social event, I will make something up, to keep the whole charade going. The charade where we all pretend to know things. It’s fun. If I say “I don’t know” in response to everything, people will stop talking to me. You guys are making it up too, right?

Eternity: I like to imagine life is a movie that goes forever. You sit back and watch your character go through various trials. Sometimes you get involved. Sometimes you sit back and laugh.

Do you think you can handle forever? I think you can. The alternative may be a black screen where nothing happens. Nothing. Perhaps life should be called Better than Nothing. How much better could be up to you and me.

The Thing: When you’re young, you don’t know there’s a Thing. And you think that maybe you know something. Or a lot of things. But once you know The Thing, you wonder why nobody told you. And then you realise, perhaps with some trying, that you can’t tell The Thing to anyone else. And then you wonder if you really know it.

The Ball: I may have mentioned that I kicked the footy a lot with my brother. We had a saying. “Honour the kick”, which meant that if someone kicks the ball to you, well or not, you do your best to catch it. You catch the ball to complete the process. You could kick the most amazing drop punt, but if the receiver doesn’t catch it, it just bounces away, pathetically. You catch it to make it look good. Perhaps  there’s a metaphor in that. As usual, I don’t know.