Its about balancing quality and quantity … Life. Here I’m talking about something said to me about a little old lady in palliative care – my mother. My mother’s 82 and yes, I suppose at that stage, life may be about the balancing of quality with quantity. But what if one is say, 55 years old? Is it as easy to balance quality with quantity? Who says just what is the quantity that must be balanced with quality? Who is it that says ‘this is quality’?

What does quantity matter when there is no quality? Its like being told that the economy is strong, yet to keep it strong one must be content to live like a pig. Pigs, we are told of course, are quite happy to live in shit, but let me tell you that pigs are much happier living in quality shit than in an unending quantity of their own shit. You may say to me, “Ah, but if you give the pig the option of living for eternity wallowing in his own shit or 2 years of life living in the quality waste of say, Tony Abbott’s kitchen disgards … The pig will always choose quantity over quality.” Why, I ask? What makes this so? Who is the mind that judges the meaning of the pigs idea of quality?

I don’t suppose there are too many people who, for a lack of quality in their lives, don’t happen to be able to sleep through the night and rather than stare into the darkness and shiver with cold, turn on the radio for some sort of relief only to find some mind telling them that no matter what; quantity is much more satisfying than quality. Its an obscenity. How many souls have suicided for no other reason than the fact that some other mind is telling them that, no matter what, life in quantity is just so much better than a life without quality … A while ago I had the choice of sitting up late into the early hours and hearing a priest bang on about this, saying that once upon a time he too found his life without quality but then, he saw the light and ‘pow’, suddenly all the quality miraculously reappeared into his life. That where there was only darkness before now there is only light. I say choice, because I did of course have the choice to keep sitting in the darkness freezing and listening to this patronising rubbish or turn off the radio and freeze by myself in the darkness. I turned off this patronising priest with his false light and made do with my honest darkness.

Why, because honest darkness is just so so much better that false light.

” .. but in the long term the attempt to avoid challenges to one’s own assumptions, testing our ideas against experience, and revising out theories in light of new information can only prove self defeating. Or, as Orwell warned, “sooner or later a false belief bumps against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”” – Kristian Williams, ‘ Between the Bullet and the Lie’.