Absurd

Sometimes the blatant absurdity of it all just hits you.

You’re suddenly struck by how crazy it is to get out of bed in the pre-dawn just to ride your bike a couple miles uphill so you can spend an hour or so bending yourself into physical positions developed by an elderly Sanskrit scholar in Southern India for the youth of the Maharaja’s palace and made popular and available to Westerners because some hippies in the 1970s found their way to a tiny yoga shala in a small city of an out-of-the-way part of the country to study with a essentially unknown teacher who only taught locals at the time.

And even more bizarre is that you do this in a world where a former reality television star is President of a country whose military budget is larger than those of the next nine countries combined and in which it’s considered perfectly acceptable that grown men wearing pajamas and chasing a ball around a field surrounded by fifty thousand fans eating hot dogs and drinking beer earn a thousand times more a year than do the people teaching their children how to read and write.

And stranger still, this all happens on a planet whose climate, due in no small part to the activities of human beings, is changing so significantly that life, as all species have come to know it over the last 10 million years or so, is likely to no longer be possible within a hundred years or less and yet, nevertheless, nearly everyone just goes along as if everything is fine, nothing to worry about, no changes needed.

And if that isn’t weird enough, note that no matter what, it’s all going to be eradicated anyway when the sun eventually subsumes most of the solar system, so what’s the point really in the long run?

And then, to top it off, the freakiest part of all is here you are, writing about it.