excerpts from "Life After God"
just a few excerpts from, "Life After God", by Douglas Coupland. A great book.
"But I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. New scenery continually erases what came before; memory is lost, suffled, relabeled and forgotten. Gum is chewed; buttons are pushed; windows are lowered and opened. A fast, moving car is the only place where you're legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It's enforced meditation and this is good."
"...one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity - the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary - to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss."
"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we missed the change to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy."
"Yet how often is it we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness - so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?"
"But I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. New scenery continually erases what came before; memory is lost, suffled, relabeled and forgotten. Gum is chewed; buttons are pushed; windows are lowered and opened. A fast, moving car is the only place where you're legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It's enforced meditation and this is good."
"...one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity - the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary - to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss."
"Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we missed the change to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy."
"Yet how often is it we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness - so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?"