What's my predominating thought? Besides the token appreciation and love for friends and family, my predominating thought is why did Russell Brand stop doing The Trews, go quiet on social media and head in to a self-imposed exile of contemplation, reflection and learning?
My Mum must've watched nearly every episode, so I posed the question to her whilst catching up for a mother/son date to see Suffragette, about the UK women's suffrage movement.
My birthday present to Mum last year was another mother/son date to see an autobiographical film tilted Brand: The Second Coming at MIFF. It was the best film I saw last year, second only to Brand's Emperor's New Clothes with Michael Winterbottom.
Mum and I share something that I could only describe as something akin to a psychic precognition/extra-sensory perception. I'm not at all fazed whatever scepticism that elicits. Confirmation bias is irrelevant to me when I know my inner workings with more conviction than anything else.
Mum posited after Brand: The Second Coming, with maternal affection toward Russell, that "I worry about him sometimes." I asked what she meant, and after holding a pregnant pause, offered that she worried that someone would kill him.
In 2015, my overriding reflection is that the state of planet Earth got too big for me. How does Batman maintain resilience in the face of holding the fate of Gothamites on his shoulders? Powerful deltoids and an industrialist empire at one's disposal seem humble by comparison to maintaining the psychological strength to understand the state of the world and take it upon oneself to remedy.
The world is so bad right now. I mean that as the farthest thing from a glass-half-empty perspective. I must be an optimist, otherwise I couldn't look at myself in the mirror (I try to avoid looking at myself in the mirror anyhow, but I've been known to pout on the way out the door, pointing as I go at my reflection).
"Luke Skywalker has vanished." I wonder if there's a motif or trope I relish more than the self-imposed exile. My overriding life dream is to disappear for seven years, returning with the boon.
I saw Russell at Rod Laver Arena for his Trew World Order show after his self-imposed Internet exile last year in October, a few days after my 30th birthday. I just realised that day coincided with what might end being one of the most formative turning points of my adulthood, but which I'll keep Mum on for now.
I think he's reached a level of transcendence for which I'd be incredibly envious, were it not for the irony it would incur for a self-described narcissist in Brand, preaching our interconnected One-ness with the Whole, and the resignation of ego for all to recognise this fact of the Universe.
Whether reform slowly or revolution swiftly, change must be sustainable. Yet bursting out of my skin and bones is an urgency, a voice deep from the Source that says steadily, but insistently and with strength, "Now".
We carry about with our carry bags of designer goodies, exhaust the fossilised Life from millennia ago at the service of our social status, all the while ignoring that we live in a society, and share the planet and livelihoods with myriad species.
It's a path, a journey, a quest. It's gradual change of hearts and minds, but something just tells me it's Now. If not Now, then when?
What thought predominates in 2016?
Luke Skywalker has vanished...Russell Brand is learning.
It's go time. You've gotta go, you've gotta make it sustainable, even if you want to transcend. It's got to be spiritual; it's got to be cheeky; it has to have a shamanic, uninhibited dance about it; it has to be sexy. You've got to pull your pants down and moon the tram of the World and all its craziness.