Responsibility

RICHARD: No, the utter reliability of being always happy and harmless replaces the onerous burden of being responsible … and actuality’s blithe sincerity dispenses with the gloomy seriousness that epitomises adulthood.

It is funny – in a peculiar way – for I often gain the impression when I speak to others, that I am spoiling their game-plan. It seems as if they wish to search forever … they consider arriving to be boring. How can unconditional peace and happiness, twenty-four-hours-a-day, possibly be boring? Is a carefree life all that difficult to comprehend? Why persist in a sick game … and defend one’s right to do so? Why insist on suffering when blitheness is freely available here and now? Is a life of perennial gaiety something to be scorned? I have even had people say, accusingly, that I could not possibly be happy when there is so much suffering going on in the world. The logic of this defies credibility: Am I to wait until everybody else is happy before I am? If I was to wait, I would be waiting forever … for under this twisted rationale, no one would dare to be the first to be happy. Their peculiar reasoning allows only for a mass happiness to occur globally; overnight success, as it were. Someone has to be intrepid enough to be first, to show what is possible to a benighted humanity.

One has to face the opprobrium of one’s ill-informed peers.

RICHARD: I laugh a lot … there is so much about life, the universe and what it is to be a human being living in the world as-it-is, sans ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul, that I find irrepressibly ludicrous.

RICHARD: No, there is nothing ‘serious’ in what I do or say – sincere yes – but ‘serious’? No way … life is too much fun to be serious (in order for there to be seriousness there must be an in situ responsibility).

RICHARD: No … surely you are not really suggesting that it is ‘a lot of fun’ (‘fun’: playful, humorous, comical, amusing, entertaining, pleasurable) to be ‘serious’ (‘serious’: solemn, staid, stolid, sombre, grave, stern, grim)?