I had written what I think was the best thing I have ever written and clicked on submit only to lose the lot as the futurelearn site went down ! I didn’t put it on paper as I thought my dog might get at it. From what I can remember, my screed went a bit like this. In life I see two types of people, planners and drifters. The planners to varying degrees organise their future, whilst drifters do not. Drifters seem to rely on confabulation more than planners simply because they can be more readily surprised. When things go wrong for a planner, annoyance seems to be the first impulse followed by blame and then a work around of the plan. Drifters need to be more inventive and rapid invention of an excuse often leads to a “why the hell did I say that” moment and often a flushing of the face. Can planners become drifters ? It seems more likely that drifters could become planners but I think we are type cast and at the end of the day always revert to type. I think that most fabrications rely on building upon someone else’s. This is the “meme” approach and allows one to reach in a more reliable way. Certainly where the inventor is hiding information, it is better to use something mostly tried and tested. And it provides a better chance of spontaneity. When it comes to religion, I imagine a planner being more eager to believe than a drifter might. Drifters don’t need to consider the proposition until they near it. For me, religion is a long time collection and confusion of ideas like tangled spaghetti. Individual threads of spaghetti are coherent but getting them out in one piece is a challenge. I know several GPs who tell of their awareness of something strange, intangible and sometimes overwhelming when someone dies, and I know of people involved in battle who experienced other worldliness when someone is killed. Whatever that intangible thing is, I’m not convinced that religion does it justice.

12th June 2015