Pineapple Philosophy

Pineapple Philosophy ~ In recent times some of my friends, and people around me more generally have gone through hard times, this blog and my words are inspired from, and written for those people who I care about most, and mean a lot to me. Often I never know what to say and/or say the wrong thing. Hopefully this written articulation will get somewhat closer to what I cannot, but should say in recent times.

I have come to realize, over my relatively short life-span to date, that life throws all sort of things at you. These things can be good or bad, sometimes they are nice and sometimes they are horrible. More often than not they are unplanned but some are indeed planned. We can only play the guessing of who, what and when. By that I don't mean Reverend Green, in the Study, with a Wrench (although I do feel at times that life can scarily be akin to a game of Cluedo...or perhaps monopoly hmmm). What I mean is essentially the deep understanding of, I will quote from Confucius (or was is Plato?) who once inspired simplicity and clarity in our thinking. The one quote which no matter what situation, how old, how too far gone, how deep you may feel under. The quote that when said, people all turn to each other with an inner belief that, yes its so so true. In fact, I bet that no matter who reads this will disagree with the quote, and clearly if you do, I'm afraid you live in bubble-wrap, cotton wooled world, with your fingers in your ears and your eyes firmly blindfolded.(sheltered in a nutshell- the irony in that phrase lol) Without any further rhetoric and successful suspense building, and extreme gilding the Lilly, I of course refer to the universally understood expression of:

'Shit happens'

Ok...so perhaps it wasn't quite Socrates or Artistotle worthy, but nonetheless what I love about the phrase is how much it has transversed popular language, and popular culture. You can buy car stickers, posters, mouse mats (thought: what ever happened to the common mouse mat? did mice just get used to our desktops...anyway tangent), I have even seen mugs with it on. On countless occasions I have verbally heard the expression, and if one was to take a sit back and contemplate its pure genius for one second. Consider your life, consider the times where no greater phrase could sum up your countless scenarios....true no?


Now, I want to tell you two stories about my life, both of which I warn, are random. The first is about a pineapple. Within an episode 10 Series 1 How I met Your Mother entitled 'The Pineapple Incident', a scenario occurs whereby the main character Ted wakes up next to a random pineapple after a drunk night out. He has no recollection of why or how it got there, and sadly it is never explained (part of the genius). I tell you this story, not because I am further plugging the genius that is HIMYM, but because it inspired a present a give to one of my friends, whose birthday it was around the time. That combined with my typical student lifestyle of all play and NO money, I thought it was an apt present. When I gave it to her, at first she was really confused, and then found it highly amusing, and in the end became proud of her unique, yet odd present for her birthday which she fondly recalls to this day.The story goes on, the genius behind this story came from her later on, when Christmas this year came around. Surely enough, she batted back the 'odd' present and gave me a coconut and a pomegranate, genius.

The second story is a little more retrospective and heavy. 3 years ago I travelled half-way around the world to 'THE' most remote Caribbean island of Tortola, its within the British Islands, north-Caribbean. When I arrived I met a man who I didn't know. He was, for all intensive purposes, a stranger to me, and to this day I still consider him a stranger. I then proceeded to spend two weeks on a 30 foot sailing boat in a lagoon, and I slept on deck under the open stars for two weeks on this stranger boat. I then left and two ferries, a jeep, a propeller plane,a boeing 474 and two taxi rides later I arrived home. 5 months or so later I met the same man in the ICU unit back in Cambridge hospital, Addenbrookes. Of those who don't know Cambridge is my home town. That man, as you may have guessed was not well, and in fact was dying. Slowly. He had advanced cancer in the bowel, with moved to his stomach, kidney and liver. 6 months, two operations and a dose of MRSA later he died in a retirement home at the age of 55 years old next to an aquarium, a stark difference from the boat I had once visited. The stranger was, by the way, my father.

All in all one odd and one sad story I think most will agree. You may also be wondering what these stories have in common, well sticking to our basic philosophy of 'Shit happens, right?' Well don't forget shit can be good as well as bad as we discussed in the introduction. What makes life all that interesting, and all that random, and all that inspiring is how we deal and how we learn from situations, no matter how simplistic and trivial (pineapple) and severe (my father). These all influence us and others around us. It moulds us into experienced individuals. Some for the better and sadly some for the worse. Its true things to happen in life, and rightly or wrongly, it is not for us to decide what happens, or how is happens, how much or little of something happens, no. No, none of that is in our control. What we control is us. So next time anything at all influences or happens in your life. Take it positively, and know that somehow, if you chose to, your are a better person for it. Let the trivial stuff be fun and free and let the deeper, often shitty stuff not get to you. It happens. That is why I believe life should be more random. More like the pineapple incident. So enjoy it :) x9