Charles de Lint
I have always really enjoyed this weird little way of looking at things in the world and it has made me smile across the years. I thought to myself it was time to ponder it, and then as I began I realised that given the current political environment in places it has more than a ring of truth to it.
I'll start with the whimsical, then maybe move to the more realistic.
It amuses me to think that all that we know and believe to be is really just an agreement made up some long time ago and that it has been easy to accept it and just go along with it being real. Thinking about things like time - how we accept the order and length of its measure; how we all just go along with weeks and months and how many days and don't really need to question them.
But then I think about how so much of our democracies are in fact based upon conventions. That behind the conventions and the way we do things there isn't really anything firmer or more enforceable. We make so many assumptions about the way we do things in a democracy and it has been scary over recent years in any number of countries, to realise that in fact we have just been doing them that way because folk agreed a long time ago that that is how we would behave and act. It only takes a challenger to show how little force our conventions truly have.
So a whimsical pondering turned far more serious as I pondered.
Looking up towards the flag that sits atop Australia's Parliament House in Canberra - our seat of democracy...
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