Contemplating life’s great imponderables

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It is often life’s great imponderables that can keep you awake at night – not least how you never hear your own snoring, but anyone else’s will ensure you’re staring at the ceiling while the rest of the world is at peace.

And while you’re lying there, you might also get to wondering why it is that we never fall out of bed when we do eventually get to sleep – despite the fact that we are marooned on what is effectively a six foot square plateau a good three feet off the ground.

But then again, you might well ask why round pizzas always come in square boxes. Or the square area that boxers fight in is called a ring.

Perhaps it’s the metamorphosis that we’re going through here this week that triggered all this contemplation on life’s bigger questions – not that there’s been much time for that in recent weeks as we planned for our revamp……and on that point, we really hope you like it.

But back to those important questions that mostly have no answers.

Watching the recent Winter Olympics, you’d have to wonder who was the guy who had the brainwave to fly across frozen ice at 140 kilometres an hour…anchored to a glorified tea-tray.

In a similar vein – and having watched the Oscar-winning movie Gravity recently – wasn’t it an extraordinary leap of faith to think that man would make it to the moon and back?

Most of all, think about – what inspired the first man to milk a cow….and then drink the milk?

Or in terms of pointless sports, who thought that curling – really people with sweeping brushes that aid bowling on ice – should get the same sort of Olympic status as, say, downhill skiing?

But then again, when you think of skiing, who’d have thought that attaching two narrow planks to your feet would represent the best way to come rapidly down the side of a snowy mountain?

It’s not just winter sports either; William Webb Ellis deserves every credit for inventing rugby by picking up the football and running off with it under his arm – but if you did that now in the middle of a soccer match, you’d be beaten within an inch of your life.

And if someone came up with the template for hurling now, they’d have their sanity seriously questioned.

So sport alone would give you endless food for thought, but there are a million imponderables in everyday life – if you just think about it.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.