Nocturnal rant

Running hard trying to keep up with life.  A thirty year sprint, where the finish-line is wherever the shoe-leather wears out.  Where the knees collapse, or the will to carry on keels over. We ask too much of ourselves, or we die from boredom.  How did we come to be in this place?  Where went sitting in a oak-beamed snug by a roaring fire with a pint and a best mate?  Or in the electric glare of some post-war tribute to working-class optimism among nondescript tables of Bass Charrington?  Where indeed went security?  Do we miss it, mourn it, or dance on its grave, to join the world of the Free and the realm of limitless opportunity - as long as we don’t mind waking in the night sweating, palpitating and trying to make sense of a place where nothing is still, a moving rock-face with a million hand-holds, all of them made of sand.  How did we get here?  Surrounded by goods and opportunities, convenience versions of Livingstone’s life’s-work, reached through a the click of a mouse and a barcoded air-ticket?  How can we tell when opportunity becomes tyranny?  When limitless wealth becomes a bottomless pit?  When we are looking around us and no longer recognise our brothers and sisters for what they are?  Will we only see them as ballast, slowing us down?  As food?  When will we know we have lost humanity?  We live without God.  Without intellect.  Without morals.  Our compass runs with the herd.  Any direction is the right direction as long as it’s the one that everyone else appears to be taking.  We claim to love freedom, yet sneer at those who brought Magna Carta, habeas corpus, the constitutions of France and the United States.  We don’t trust them.  They waste their time and our money.  Deny common sense.  They are a drain on the potential for wealth.  Yet, without them, our wealth could never have been achieved.  "Don’t trust books!"  "Don’t trust Dons!"  "Don’t trust the French!"  Don’t get me wrong – I value freedom more than anything else.  There are few things I would die for – flag, Queen and blood are not on my list – but I would kill and die for my freedom (and maybe yours).   But where is meaning?  Love of education and intellect? Where is life that goes beyond things I can buy on the Internet?  I can travel to see every great artefact and feature on the planet, but when do I get the time to sit and speak to people I’ve never met, to people I walk past every day, to my mother, my son and daughter, my grandchildren? Where is fraternity?  When do I get to sit under a tree by a river and simply be?  Where is the humble self?  Where is the time to reflect?  The years fly by and soon I’ll be dead and someone born twenty years after will wake in the night as I have woken and try to work out what is wrong.  They’ll find their own reasons for sleeplessness, I’m sure.  I wish them well.  I hope they find meaning.  I hope humanity finds its way and the reasons why are restored.  Can all of those three thousand years be wrong?