Worthiness

A quote to start the day - this is definitely becoming a habit.

The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rilke

Too true, you may say and I agree, though with the uncomfortable suspicion that this is just another of those truisms, which inevitably leave one with an impossible itch to scratch.

First question. Where to start? From here, where I seem to have ended by accident and definitely not design (design/planning always being an afterthought in my life) the way forward seems hard to define. So, to reiterate - where do I start?

In the olden days, when I was in my 20's, a spot of VSO work in a hot and sweaty country, less fortunate than ours, used to do the trick. There's nothing like some selfish altruism to put ourselves and the world to rights, but now we all know (if we read the Guardian) that Aid is not the answer and Bob Geldorf's efforts to guilt us into getting our 'fucking' money out (however well intentioned) did more than harm than good. Worse still, for me at least, working as an NGO project manager finally put an end to my naive belief that £5.00 really could save a child from blindness or an orphan from starvation. No, it paid for the fundraisers who initiated the donation and wrote the thank you letter. Just as it paid for my salary and my trips abroad (for which I am very grateful) to monitor the indigenous staff, but the so-called recipients themselves told another story.

So what questions or answers are left to someone who has already reached the outside lane and has to shout the loudest to be heard? Teaching English in Cambodia, or doing a stretch in Tahiti on one of our Rotarian projects, but isn't that just more of the same? Blasting out a few articles to the already converted and venting my spleen on people who aren't listening. I would like to be Michael Moore, or Polly Toynbee, or even Kofi Annan, but I am realistic and can, finally after all these years, see that not everything is possible (though I am careful not to let Lucy know, in the hope that she will never find out and be truly great). So, to repeat, What questions?

I suppose this is where I should close with a long, happy ending, list of my skills and talents, every one of them laden with potential, but that only happens in books called How To Be A Millionaire and websites that tell you to First Learn to Love Yourself (if someone has created an emoticon for a digital finger stuck down a digital throat, please pass it on so that I can do the same to those perpetual promoters of psychobabble), which brings me back to my original question. So what next? What can a grumpy, middle-aged, determinedly pessimistic (if I can't find a reason to be miserable I'll read watch the news and find one) and frighteningly like my mother, woman do to change the world?

All suggestions gratefully, but probably not gracefully, received.

And one more quote to close:
Life's a pile of shit, when you look at it .... Life of Brian (of course)