A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more
than an unfounded rumour.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was one of those writers, I felt I had to read when in my late teens. Like Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, or Carlos Castaneda. Today I think I was too young when I first tried. I don’t think I really understood what I was reading.

I don’t have (or take?) the time anymore to read much. But when I come across my ‘old’ favourites today, I see much more humour in their writings than I did back then. And that’s what I like most about them.

Death: no more than an unfounded rumour.

That’s a classic. And it made me smile.

One of my favourite songs is “Everybody knows” by Leonard Cohen. In my mind, its point is that frustrations are based on expectations. Or, in the words of Antonio Banderas, expectation is the mother of all frustration. If you know that the dice is loaded, if you know that the boat is leaking and the captain lied, well – then you won’t be surprised and, thus not frustrated, when you drown, when it’s coming apart.

And yet, last week I struggled. Maybe there was just too much of what everybody knows, happening all at once.

But then, someone sent me a short video of a Tommy Cooper joke about a Mexican, a German, and an Irishman. And I smiled again.

Leon Trotsky once said that life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

In a way, I am lucky because I have this great idea that will carry me through life, despite deep frustration taking hold of me from time to time. And I have family and friends, compadres, who believe in the same idea.

It is this idea that raises us above personal misery, weakness, and all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

Death, after all, might just be an unfounded rumour.