Timing is everything

Now, I'm not one for burial (I'm an ashes scattered kinda guy), but if I were in a burial sort of mood then I'd want my headstone to read "Always with the best intentions".

Now, allow me to clarify; The foregoing is not intended to convey that I have gone through my life thus far trying at all times to ensure I did and do the right thing at all junctures. To say that I have or that I do would simply be untrue, I'm imperfect, just like the rest of you. What I am referring to is the unique kind of vanity that comes from planning ones own send-off. When indulging in such behaviour, as only those who aren't faced with the situation in earnest are able to, we tend to spend time imagining profound and meaningful ways to describe ourselves, rejecting early drafts of our self-composed obituary as we whittle the wording down to something understated, elegant and profound.

But what is it that drives us to such insane, introspective vanity? I must admit that I myself, when daydreaming in such a fashion have found great comfort in the process, a sort of enjoyable melancholy akin to the feeling of sadness at the end of a particularly engrossing novel or the effects of listening to downbeat-yet-beautiful music. Is this a symptom of our spoiled and needful collective nature? Is it something for which we should feel genuinely (not self-indulgently) guilty?

As we go through our lives, we will often be met with challenges in various forms; bereavement, heartache, illness, financial concerns etc. but it is how we deal with these problems, tackle these obstacles and continue on with our lives in spite of them which defines us as people. Daydreaming is a luxury which we allow ourselves in order to give our minds some small respite from the metaphorical holes which we find ourselves in. As Sigmund Freud puts it, "As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now fantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams. I believe that most people construct fantasies at times in their lives. This is a fact which has long been overlooked and whose importance has therefore not been sufficiently appreciated."

"Castles in the air" is a wonderfully descriptive and imaginative term which Freud has used to describe this acute and deeply personal behaviour of adults. The statement by Freud that we as adults have created daydreaming as a surrogate for childhood physical and mental play is an interesting and intriguing one, the inference being that we quite simply require to fill that void with something else as we pass out of our childhood stages. With that in mind, now let's re-visit our earlier feelings of guilt for self-indulgent death fantasies. Do we, knowing as we now do that we are drawn to flights of fantasy, still feel the same sense of shame about our secret and personal thoughts?

And so it is, that we will continue to fashion our castles in the air and imagine bittersweet ways in which we'd like to be seen by others, luxuriating for a brief time in the self-made ego massage of it all. We are, after all, only human.
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