THE ILLUSION

THE ILLUSION


The filling station near the county cricket club has gone.


It used to be there but its gone now.


It was there for as long as I can remember, for many years but now in its place is level concrete and very nearly fresh air.

Introspection becomes immediately operative. I marvel at the size of my own reaction to its absence. Can it be that this disgruntles me? Surely this is not something that bothers me is it? It would appear so. Why am I surprised by a regular building reform? Why am I feeling a vague discomfort, why? Why is my first reaction to the vast majority of all change negative?


The filling station is gone. It used to be there but it is not anymore.

In the very same way the entire infrastructure of the man made world is as vulnerable. It is here now but that is for now. It all affords an illusion of permanence but it is very temporary. The man made world as well as the natural world about us as we know it is renting a location upon the indifferent earth. It is all transient. We know this. We know it and we know it by the time we are developing children. But the illusion of permanence makes us forget it.


The filling station just there on the left was there since my youth but today the spot on which it had bonded with as a mature landmark is a pale courtyard awaiting the spoils of enterprising minds. I had better keep my mind on the road as I’m driving.


I think of human aging differently lately. It is not the same as the wearing down and the attrition of a stone or a coastal face. It really doesn’t matter if one looks good for sixty or moves sprightly for thirty. Looking or performing well for ones age doesn’t mean extended longevity. Inside of us is a clock that ticks its finite ticks and then time is up. Gravity and radicals pull and bombard our skin so that it wrinkles and sags but that is not getting older so much as something that happens as we get older. Getting older is the depletion of ticks as is the change that makes filling stations vanish.


Change is necessary.
Change is good as often as it is bad.
Change is life.


TIM SANSOM 24TH OCTOBER 2006