100% charged

We’re prepared. Ready to go. 100% charged. Buffed and primed. Paradoxically we’ve nowhere to go. And just as well! We’re inert, presently resigned to unrepentant immobility, smugly content to languish in the cool summer breeze and warming yellow sunshine, book in tow, listening to our favourite music or watching a new show. Eager to succumb to hypnotic drifting dreams filled with sometimes curious images and soporific lacquer. The things that take you somewhere else. That magic feeling “Nowhere to go, nothing to do!

Today has wrought a lazy summer afternoon in early July. A thoroughly splendid day! Earlier this morning- say about eight o’clock  – we initiated the requisite ceremony to launder sheets and tidy the apartment. All about us is now squared. The air is perfumed with the scent of lavender. Within that matutinal compass of industry we cycled past the Saturday morning market by the Elizabeth Kelly Library onto the erstwhile railway path where there were parents pushing perambulators and walking little dogs. Two pensive women with grey and white hair wore large straw hats which dignified their appearance and nurtured the summer aroma. Plus we saw an uncommon stream of elderly cyclists on speed bikes, outfitted in shiny red Lycra, consumed by their prolonged objective, barely uttering a passing Hello!

Curiously today I ate nothing until mid-afternoon, and then only an apple. From the moment of my awakening this morning I’ve been absorbed in that instinctive urge we all have on occasion to complete preliminary exigencies. It matters not what those urgent needs may be. Instead it is the demand to render a state of perfection in what may have been a discombobulated condition. There was a time when I blamed myself for what I characterized as obsessive behaviour. I see now I was mistaken.  The distemper is universal! We’re both the same! And yet what a delightfully pragmatic match! Just another reward of the day! We were two in the Aviator this morning, windows open, speechless, sailing along the smooth ribbon of highway past the verdant fields.

Naturally we have better things to do than straighten furniture or shop for groceries. But what a consummate success it is to acquaint oneself with utter irrelevance and no imperative. Even if only briefly. I have no doubt this lapse of industry and seeming beneficence is destined to be short lived. Meanwhile I have let my mind wander, snatching ancient memories, revisiting distant thoughts, thinking about family. Such vigour! Voltaire may be right, this is indeed the best of all possible worlds.

The phrase “the best of all possible worlds” (French: le meilleur des mondes possibles; German: Die beste aller möglichen Welten) was coined by the Germanpolymath and Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 work Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal (Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil), more commonly known simply as the Theodicy. The claim that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds is the central argument in Leibniz’s theodicy, or his attempt to solve the problem of evil.