3 min read
As this is the first post that will appear on my shiny new blog, I thought it only fitting to unload a musing that’s been hanging around in my head for a few years now.
A bit of backstory - I come from a seaside town in the East of Ireland, it wasn’t - and still is not - exactly a bustling metropolis, so when I would go out to explore, I would be free to let my mind wander without the thought of bothering anyone around me.
Wicklow Pier
As a result, being beside the sea or sat on a pier has always been my happy place. I would take a seat on at the edge of the water and let my thoughts swim around in my head to a backdrop of the expanse of the ocean ahead.
It was one such evening and suddenly a thought occurred to me after seeing a seal, it’s head breaking the surface for a moment to have a look around, only to retreat back to its more familiar oceanic dwellings. Seeing him stop and look around, it occurred to me just how different our world must be in his eyes.
Here, floating before me, was an animal that was not a stranger to me. Obviously in school and in our own research of the world around us, seals and other such sea creatures are not exactly a rare occurrence, we can read about their anatomy, what makes them tick, certainly more about them than they themselves would know.
But on the flip-side, they live in a completely different world to ours. A world untouched by modern civilisation, there’s no cities, no beauty spots, not even so much as lighting, but they go about their days as surely as you or I would.
This was my first proper existential revelation, the idea that a world exists alongside our own that works in a completely different way, where remnants of our world can be found in the form of something as small as a stone with a smiley face etched into it to something as large as a shipwreck/plane-wreck that they then come to inhabit and claim as their own.
TLDR; I saw a seal, I thought about how much bigger its world is than ours yet how comparatively empty, and had an existential moment right then and there.
Thanks for reading the first in what I’m sure will become a fair collection of thought residue articulated into a form that is adequately readable.