Contemplation

To make much of time!

Yes, you’ve got it right, it’s another posting from me, Jason Shaw, that mad English guy who writes a blog about going from one midlife crisis to the next!

I gazed out the kitchen window waiting for the rain to stop so I could nip up the shop for the paper, but an hour later I was still there, in the kitchen, not gazing out the window, but wondering just exactly how many shreds of orange peel there was in my jar of expensive marmalade!

You kind of know you have to much time on your hands when you‘re thinking about marmalade in such detail. I even pondered the possibility of buying four jars, extracting the shreds with tweezers and calculating the average from the assembled mass of shreds of peel. (would it be a mass of peel? Perhaps it would be more a collection? Or indeed a multitude? No, I think mass is better, you’ll possibly agree, after all it does have mass-a-peel) You see, I may have a full time job, working four on and four off, but I still have way too much time to contemplate such things.

I don’t know why I do it, I just do, there is something inbuilt that just forces me to stop, consider and contemplate things like the meaning of life, our cosmic position in the universe or thick cut orange marmalade as the case may be. It‘s not something I always did, no it‘s just a recent addition to my personality, something that I‘ve noticed doing more and more since I hit the big 4-0 earlier in the year. It‘s as if, turning that age has made me less of the young hip and happening man about town (I‘m not sure I ever really was, but stay with me here – just a while longer) waiting for the hat to drop to be at the party. Now, I sit, stand or just stare and contemplate, consider and mentally ruminate and rummage. I can‘t help it, it just happens, I try and stop it, I try and move on from it, get on with life and things of meaning.

Just the other morning I was contemplating and I said to myself, “Now Jason stop that this instant, you are not going to count the number of frozen peas in that bag, get on with something useful!” So in to town I was going to head, I got out the bus timetable to plan. I was still there, an hour later, contemplating if the No1 actually did just go all the way from Whitehawk to Mile Oak, kick everyone off, turn round and come back. Or did they stop there at the end, have a little rest, so the driver could open his lunch box and have his sandwiches, which then lead on to a whole new sphere in my contemplation – what did the bus driver have in his sarnie, or perhaps it was a Panini, after all why can’t bus drivers be pretentious middle class consumers as well!

Anyway, I‘m off now, I‘ve got far more pressing things to do with my time, like consider how many broken paving slabs there are down North Street between the clock tower and the bus stop ! And just what filling the bus driver would have in said Panini, for example!!

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying.