The Red Queen effect

I know how I often talk here about how we and I in particular have to keep moving. How we can't stand on ceremony and stay exactly as we are, where we are. The world just doesn't work like that.

But there is a flipside, isn't there? Of course there is, isn't there always in everything?

In Lewis Carrol's 'Through the Looking Glass', the Red Queen says to Alice: "It takes all the running you can do to stay in one place."

It has often been used to describe the sexual process of life; to reproduce over and over again just to remain and maintain the human race. To keep the world alive of us. What about our plain ordinary days where it is also quite simply about what we do every day, not just the sex part (well, if you do get it every day, consider yourself lucky). We run up and down, from right to left and back again, just to stay exactly where we are: to put food on the table, to pay the bills, the rent or mortgage. To maintain and just keep our place in this world. Sometimes it takes real courage to move on in life and progress, to throw Status Quo off a cliff. But to just to be in life. And sacrifice. I know people who have made sacrifices to do both, I suppose I have done too.

Everyone will always have rough patches in life, and it was only recently that light dawned upon marble stone head and made me realise how much I have ran in the last few years, just to be in the now. And for me, that's important - knowing how to be, knowing Carpe Diem. It will continue to do so. I've written here before how we don't have to understand this world of ours, it's more important to just know how to stay in it.

And I will always do this, promise, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, stick-a-needle-in-my-eye. Just like the Lion and the Gazelle fable - it's important to get up and run. The day is for running, the night is for breathing and knowing who you are in the dark. Amigo comprende what's important. Progress.