Colour me yellow...

When I'm feeling
...like singing walking on sunshine
...happy as a child
...bright as the noon day sun
...alive to my core
...golden
...like a daisy
...like lots of smiley faces :) :) :) :) :) 
...canaryish and ducklike
...lovely lemon-like
...friendly
...liquid warmth like syrup
...fuzzy and peach skinned
...glowing from the inside
...cautious as an F1 flag
...incipid, pale and washed out 
...like a failed code execution on a website
...withering like a dying yellow rose
...high-speed like a lan cable
...winning the Tour de France jersey
...showing off in a garish BMW
.........feeling yellow.....

Too much..

I've been doing a lot of reading and general investigating and searching on the internet recently.. on a sidenote: I wonder if scouring the internet counts as searching for the meaning of life? It must be on the www by now surely.....?

Anyway, I digress.. while I've been doing all this searching and signing up etc etc, I seem to have had a couple of revelations - 'Aha! moments' they're usually called.

The first 'Aha!' is that people don't know what they want.

Now I'm not talking about how you like your steak cooked or what colour you like, those questions you've been asked ever since you could talk so you've had to come up with an answer for those. Do you usually chose the same size and cut of jeans because you went through all the trouble years ago and have stuck with the choice you made then? Or do you usually wear a blue shirt with navy pants because your one girlfriend told you once that you looked good like that?

If I was to ask you how you like your coffee what would you say? Weak, sweet and milky? I doubt it - according to a study, 75% of people asked said "dark and strong" but only about 20% really like it "dark and strong"..

So what's going on..? Why do we lie about what we want - sometimes without even realising it? I'm think it's because we don't really think about things.. we're bombarded day after day with loads and loads of information and on top of that we've become so incredibly lazy and 'open minded' so we accept things at face value.. When the TV advertises people enjoying "strong black coffee with a rich dark aroma", we subconsciously think that this is how we are supposed to drink our coffee.. But when you go to make that cup, you're going to make it how you want it - no matter what the ads (or your doctor) says..

We're becoming immune to the usual advertising of everyday products. If you've been using a certain painkiller/toilet paper/breakfast cereal for years and it's been working for you, exactly what kind of advertising is going to get you to change your mind?

The advertising that works, however, is the advertising of the new and 'gadgety'. You've never seen this before, it could change your life (seriously....), you'll be a new/prettier/happier person once you have this.

When we say that we're going 'window shopping', that's just an excuse to go see what else is 'new' out there. We never knew that what we were missing out on was a Wii....! I mean, how did I ever get fit without the balance board/Billy Bo's Tai-bo videos/evening aerobics classes at the gym?

We're a culture of fickle and easily-bored creatures who have a handful of predetermined ideas that we've clung to from when we were angst-ridden teenagers, and the rest of our lives are easily swayed by whatever is new out there.. the iphone, twitter, wii, xbox, space saver, ps2, airbed, ps1, the big green clean machine... all the way back to sliced bread..

Everything is faster, cleaner, simpler, more efficient and we have more gadgets and things to help us get more time but I dont think I know anyone who sits around and says "Gee, look at all this free time I have now" after buying the latest and greatest gadget on the market...

And whatever is the latest and greatest now, is probably outdated in a month and old news in 6 - if you're lucky.. I'm even lucky if you've got this far into my blog..

I have to revise my 'Aha!' statement. We do know what we want, and that is that we want to be happy, but we're looking for things to 'make' us happy instead of looking inwards, because it's only us that can make ourselves happy.. nothing else..

More

Ok, so back on my topic of 'something's a coming'... The more I speak to people, the more I get the feeling that everyone is 'suffering' from the same feeling - that there's a major shift in the whole world at the moment... And you know the feeling when you adjust an uncomfortable pair of pants, that second where it's actually a little more sore but then it's a whole lot better straight afterwards? That's what it the feeling seems to be like that many people are experiencing.. 

It's not bad, it just seems a little distressing to the more sensitive ones and a little bit of an unsettling feeling to those not-so-sensitive..

The world is changing, it's straightening up, it's reaching it's arms out and stretching, dusting off the grey ugly particles that have somehow attached themselves to it.. Those dusty particles are not going to be happy but then hey, who said everyone has to be happy with everything?

Once the world has had a chance to shake itself out and stand up from it's lazyboy where it's comfortably settled over the past decades, then what? Do we all suddenly become magically enlightened fairy sprinkles of (environmentally friendly) light sparkling all over the place? Or do we hang on for dear life begging that things settle down just a little so that we can make sure our grip on reality is tight enough so that we dont fall off?

No one wrote me a manual for this. Admittedly, no one wrote me a manual for life either, but I've sortof fumbled my own way through that and the semi-path that I believe is my reality is a pretty well beaten one and one that I have quite a bit of time and energy invested in.

This is different though, I dont have a movie reference for it, I dont have a book for it, I dont even have a friendly conversation that ever referenced something like this.

There are all sorts of coincidences that are happening, I seem to be reminded about the number 73 a lot for some reason. The amount of people who decided to chose stripes for their wardrobe today was quite scary, what's even a little more unnerving is that the ones I saw were all horizontal stripes at that.. Want me to take it a little further? They were all either black and white stripes or dark and light stripes. Why? no idea.. one of those little reminders for those of us that take notice that the universe is constantly working, watching, moving, shifting - all in response to us...