SATURDAY, 7 JUNE 2003
Maybe I should retire from this game while I’m still young enough and still have a few things that count in my favour. Maybe I should admit that I’ve surpassed my expectations.
By the end of this year I will have lived in the Far East for seven years. I can speak and read a little Chinese, and in a few months’ time I will do so even better. I’ve gained some life experience and seen places and did things I never dreamed I would. I have wrung a collection of poetry from my soul, and a biographical-type book on my four years in Taiwan (or my first four years). And I have improved my relationship with my creditors to such an extent that they, ironically, think of me as a responsible adult.
Maybe this is my peak. Maybe nothing from this point on will ever be as good as it is right now. Maybe I will look back three or five or fifteen years from now and say, “Damn, that was where I again saw a sign for an exit where I could have turned back to the place I had deliberately driven past.” Maybe I should go home, and like a second team player on his way back to the locker room tap the real heroes on their shoulders and say, “There you go, guys! Best of luck!”
Am I like the pretender to the world heavyweight title who, in all honesty, should never have come so far? And now on the eve of his title fight realises he has fooled everyone? And he knows what perhaps one or two people in the crowd also suspect – that he is going to fall, on his face, in the first round.
Or maybe I’m the real thing. Maybe there really is something I want to say …
Then again, what is it that I try to express? Is it not true that all the statements I make and all the arguments I try to articulate have already been made and put into words? Is it not true that there are other people who say exactly the same things? Is it not true that what I want to say is not quite as new and profound as I sometimes think it is? Is it not true that I am not exactly the Keeper of some Secret? And is it not at the end true what that other guy in the Chuck Norris movie says – that the world doesn’t want to be saved? Is it not true the world just wants to be entertained a little bit, and every now and then wants to be encouraged, but left alone the rest of the time?
Or am I a soldier, like Chuck Norris in the said movie, who responds to the person who believes the world doesn’t want to be saved with a defiant, “Not my world”? Is it a struggle, and should I wake up and realise I am right, and I’ve been on the right track for a few years now? That this is not some silly game where the middle class are the Monopoly Masters? That I am indeed a soldier in a struggle where the entire middle-class world is but the latest battlefield?
It does, however, remind me of the Matrix where the main characters fly through the telephone lines and then in a simulated reality slam fists with the bad guys. If you die in the simulated world, it’s the end for you. Your physical body breathes its last in actual reality. So it is with The World of Money, and Good Jobs and Buying a Home and Getting Married and Having Children and Being Responsible. Ultimately it’s not about these things. These things are only part of a larger reality. But if you fail in your battles in this world, then it’s also tickets for you in the Greater War.
Am I a Participant in a Greater Struggle?
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