It's a miracle it's written at all :)

Note to self: 1) Don't compose a blog in your head, you'll lose it.
                    2) See that little button on the top right of the screen that says SAVE, use it!!!!!!

If you're thinking that I have now lost today's blog twice, you get an icecream as a prize :) I've lost this blog twice now. Once because I composed it in my head while I was walking the much fitter dog around the Gooseponds, and then forgot the whole thing. And just now when some gremlin wiped the entire blog from my screen just as I was about to post.

So here's number 3. The last one was a bit preachy anyway. The first one was awesome, but when I compose something in my head (and it hardly ever happens because I usually have only cloud there that takes form when my fingers touch the keypad) the words leak out of my head and disappear. I guess the words have sunk into the ground around the Gooseponds and maybe they will grow into little word trees or something. Have I mentioned that I'm sleep deprived? In the last blog that vanished I had a very clever line about the reason for this that was to keep you reading to the end. Of course I can't now remember how I did that.

So the whole point of this blog is to discuss boxes, pretty boxes of all shapes and sizes. The other day I had the song Little Boxes by Pete Seeger pop into my head. The song is about the conformity of suburbia, it was first written in 1962 when the cheap suburbs were going up all over America. The song stuck in my head and my mind wandered from housing to people. Because just as modern society is making bland conformist suburbs, it is also making bland conformist people. (Ha! I didn't think of that in the lost blogs).

This is not to say that the non-conformist people are not around, they are. It is more that society rewards a certain type, or at least the media manipulates things to make it appear so. Why does a footballer get paid such a huge amount of money? Why does a model get paid so much to starve herself and strut around like an emaciated stick insect in clothes that a normal person could neither wear nor afford, nor even want to wear? Why does the person who goes to Africa to study a species on the brink of extinction, or to help people who are malnourished due to lack rather than choice get nothing and no assistance?

Okay, I'm going in a different direction to that originally intended. My original point was that society is important, but it should support all people within it, and not just those perceived to be 'successful'. Success is a small word, with a pretty straightforward dictionary meaning - yes I looked it up.

Success:

• a level of social status
• achievement of a goal
• the opposite of failure

But in our personal lives success is far more complex. Success as a dictionary meaning is not necessarily what will bring happiness or fulfilment in our personal lives. Coming back to society and boxes, and my original thought: why must success be considered in a narrow field as the media feeds to us?  People are as many and varied as butterflies. What makes one person happy is not what another dreams of. And why should it be. Variety is the spice of life, yet modern society seems intent of blanding the variety out of us (blanding is a word, it is now anyway). Think of all the wonderfully unique people - the crazy cat people, the hippies, the artists, musicians, writers, the people who eschew the 'normal' values that society imposes on us, and are happy and content. 

The true meaning of success is of course as varied as the people on this earth. It's a short life, some of us know what our personal success is and some of us search for a big chunk of our lives to find it. Success, in our personal lives, is really just another way of saying the meaning of life (without those that have read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy shouting 42 at you). 

To get back to my point, and I know I'm being long winded about it, the meaning of life is different for all of us. We should all be allowed to find our own personal meaning and to be able to pursue it with the full support of friends, family, and society. Maybe it is to breed a better chicken, or write a song that Bruno Mars sings (because he's cute), or study an obscure slug that lives in the depths of the Amazon. Just because your dream may not be something society considers important does not mean you should give up on it. If it's important to you, and makes you feel that you have found the meaning of your life, then chase it, follow it, give it all you have. Because the true meaning of life is to lie on your death bed with no regrets.

Now why am I sleep deprived? Because this morning at 2am I woke to the sound of dishes banging in my kitchen. I was in bed, the boy child was in bed, the cats were on my bed - so who or what was in my kitchen? I looked at the cats, they were peacefully asleep, the dog was completely silent (this is not a reliable indicator, she was probably asleep and dreaming about food in which case the only way she'd notice a robber was if he was stealing the food) and nothing was stirring except the banging in the kitchen. I was tired, and a little bit  freaked out of my mind, so I lay there and waited for it to stop, which it did. And nothing, no footsteps, nothing. So I lay awake for the next few hours, finally went back to sleep about an hour before I needed to get up and of course woke feeling like something the cat regurgitated (not the cat that eats tinsel, nothing shiny about me this morning). I staggered into the kitchen and it was exactly the same as I had left it the night before. My immediate question was this: if there was an intruder and he/she/it/ghost felt the need to bang dishes, how come he/she/it/ghost wasn't instead motivated to wash the  dishes from the night before that I had lazily left in the sink? And how could I get he/she/it/ghost to do this next time. I bet if I woke  to the sound of dishes being washed and kitchen being cleaned I would smile and go back to sleep no problem.

I will leave you with a photo I took on an expedition to one of the beaches around here. The tide was waaaaaay out which makes it look kind of like a desert if a desert had islands and an ocean. Yeah, sleep deprived, I'll shut up now.