Yesterday we had beautiful weather. So warm and sunny for this time of year. It was the kind of day that only comes at this time of year in early spring. The sky was a beautiful cloudless blue after the early morning mist had burned away. The sun shone down lending such clarity to the green and blossoming country side around here.
I decided to fly my drone and as usual I drove around locally looking for picturesque country churches. They are quiet and I can get great video by flying right to the tops of the church towers. I also look for ones with plenty of open space around them. Too many trees can be an obstacle to a novice drone pilot.
My first port of call turned out to be St Mary’s Church in Shudy Camps, a small village on the border of Cambridgeshire and Essex. It was a beautiful peaceful place but unfortunately not suitable for a novice drone pilot owing to the proximity of trees and homes, but the day was so beautiful that I stayed a while. I wandered around the graveyard reading the gravestones. One in particular stood out. I found a peaceful bench in the churchyard and sat down to think a while as the spring birdsong surrounded me.
Is this all that life leads to? A six-foot plot under the shade of a willow tree in a small country graveyard. Is everything we have done in life, all our feelings, all of our spirit doomed to lay rotting here? I am not a religious person but even so I do not discount some kind of afterlife. Who knows until someone comes back to tell us.
But this? Is this all there is? Is all of our life just one monumental waste of time? The search for wealth or at least avoiding poverty? How can we even search for love when we know it will all just lead to separation, death and after a few short decades we will be forgotten by most people. After a generation or two no one will remember us at all. Oh yes, some lonely old fool will wander by one day and read our epitaph and maybe wonder about who we were, but he won’t know me. He will not know of the life I led; the struggles I had, the loves I had and the great love I lost. He will know nothing of me.
I am recently separated, just a matter of a couple of months but already I feel the mind-numbing loneliness of isolation creeping into my life and so I have no one any more to share these thoughts with, to talk about whether life is worth bothering about any more. Even the quest for new love, such a monumental task, now seems utterly pointless to me. Just fall in love one last time? See it destined to end in despair and self-loathing again? I have always considered myself as some modern version of Jude Fawley and I seem doomed to make his same mistakes.
But is life pointless? If so why are we born? Just some evolutionary need to continue the species? And how much good has that done us? We have evolved so much that we seek to destroy this world and each other. Love and kindness have given way to greed and war. Is that evolution? I think evolution is dumb if it is.
And slowly I hear the birds singing again. I feel the warmth of this early spring sun on my face as I snap out of this cold dark reverie. I walk back out towards the road, stopping briefly to acknowledge my long-deceased friend before leaving him to rest in final peace. I have a drone to fly, I have things to look for. I have a life to live.
© 2017 Stan M Rogers. All rights reserved.