When you write aphorisms as an avoidance strategy

Those of us who have seen clearly into the abyss seem just like everyone else, which is precisely how we like it.

It is possible to be happy without overcoming life’s problems, precisely by not overcoming them in fact.

Great hardship is a profound gift, as any ascetic worth their salt will tell you. This, anyway, is what I told my wife the other day when she started moaning (yet again) about how impossibly difficult her life is. Which it no doubt is. All lives are impossibly difficult. That’s a feature not a bug. I told my wife that too. At which point, she told me to stick my pathetic pretentious platitudes up my so-called hairy bottom, which was just like her. For the record: my bottom is not hairy, or not overly hairy.

Some lives are far messier than others, it is true, but all lives are messy to some degree. Which is not to be lamented. Without a mess there is nothing to clean up and only by cleaning can we come to see, under the layers of sediment that have accumulated over time, who we really are. And who we really are is who we have always been, which is not who we thought we were, needless to say.

On the one hand, I do and say what I please. On the other, I berate myself for doing and saying precisely that. It’s an issue. I want to stop berating myself, of course I do, but at the cost of what? Not doing or saying as I please? It might be a false economy, but that seems like too high a price to pay.

They say you can infer a great deal about a person (their sexuality, for instance) from the colour of their hair. But they say a lot of things, whoever ‘they’ are.