The solution to any problem is usually...

...contained in itself. This is what Mario, the greek squater always used to say. Don't know how much he believed in this, but personally I like to think about it that it is true.

The Gordian know or Columbus egg are all perfect examples for this. Many times we search for complicated solutions and in this search we miss the whole point. The point being that... there is no point :P. That was a bit of track, but I will get back later to this one.

Speaking about problems, here I remember what I read about how women and men approach problems in order to solve them. Usually.

Men have a more simplistic and pragmatic approach. Being simple and limited being, and aware of that, they tend to break the big problem into smaller problems, more approachable. And they repeat this process as many times as necessary, until the problems reach a level that is comprehensible for their small and simplistic brain. Just like I do here and now :P. And from that point on, they start processing and solving the small little problems, and by accumulating these partial small solution they come to a cumulative solution for the initial complex problem.

Women on the other hand have a more holistic and complex approach. They don't break the big problem into smaller ones like men do. Instead they try to process the initial problem and view it from different angles and trying to understand the different correlations between the component parts.

So in a way, one can say that while men try to chew small bits, the women don't even bother about breaking the problem, they are like pythons and swallow it whole. By the way, this is what I have read in some book about differences between men's and women's brain, as I haven't had any confirmation or infirmation about the women's approach. And this book was written by a man. So he might be wrong or just partially correct.

What I can say, that in men's case, I can attest that I behave in this way when I confront with a complex situation of problem: I break it until it reached a level that I can process.

And now coming back to the point. One of my friends from Azerbaijan, had this saying that the point is there is no point. I later added that actually this is the whole point.

Everybody, or at least most people are in search of meaning, purpose or point. And this thing is just as real as it is unreal. The purpose of life, purpose of existence, purpose of the purpose. For me the purpose is very basic and simple: Eat, sleep, fuck and repeat. Just like koalas. If you would ask a koala what is the purpose what do you think he would reply: "Well, my dear Watson, the purpose of life is to reach a higher state of being. And this you can attain if you eat enough eucalyptus leafs".

Koalas, for those who don't know spend most of their life sleeping (up to 20 hours a day, that is 83,3% of their time). And when they are awake, they eat for a good couple of hours. And the rest of what it remains they spend it fornicating. So from this point of view, one can arguably say that the point of life is sleep. And dream maybe.

However, this would be a koala's point of view. Not all animals spend most of their time sleeping. Carnivors, being superior on the evolution scale, spend less time sleeping, and much more being alert, saving their limited energy for striking when the opportunity arrives.

Anyway, thing is the point of life is there is no point. Not for everybody or everytime or everyplace. For me personally the point of life is life itself. Simply breathing, cooking, eating, sleeping, fornicating, playing the guitar, playing billiards, riding the bicycle, hiking thru forests, swimming the oceans, etc.. Actually, here is a little story I remember that goes like this:

Once upon a time a guy fell in love with a girl. But the girl was not enamored with him. So what did the guy do? Whatever he felt like. Like: he traveled the world, rode motorcycles, climbed mountains, sailed the seas, swam the rivers, left the toilet seat up, drank, smoked and ate sweets whenever he felt like it.

And in a way, that is my story as well. And for this reason I say that for me at least, the point of life consists in simple activities. Love, don't know much about it, but in my case, everytime I fell into it, for me was like a trap. I lost any vision and composure, so don't know how good in my case that was.

Actually, some scientists from the University of Dontknowanything made a research in regards of how brain changes when one gets in love (can't remember actually if it was done on male or male+female subjects) and their conclusion was that when one falls in love, that person behaves like crazy. The overflow of hormones that inundate the cerebral connections have such a dramatic effect that it impedes to function correctly and sometimes to even perform the most basic tasks like taking the garbage or watering the flowers.

Anyway, this was a scientific study performed by highly educated scholars from the University of Dontknowanything so it must be reliable.

Some argue that the whole point of life is love. That can also be true. But not necessarily the only one. As I said for me the point of life summarizes to the bare necessities: good weather, good food, good time, good spirit, good . If one can achieve these basics, I believe that sooner or later love comes along as well.

And after all, what is love? We like to think that people fall in love. Not. False. Gibberish.

Humans, or at least the masculine part of them fall in... lust, first of all. Whatever we call love, comes only later, when lust is diminished or depleted, and whatever is left we call it love. Like when you start to realize that your girl's morning breath is even worse than your dog's farts. Or that when your idea of order is her idea of chaos and viceversa. Or that the remote control is a very important issue to be settled in any relation.

A much smarter guy said "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." His name is Oscar Wilde and I don't much to tell about this guy except that he was an Irish poet and playwright that lived somewhere at the end of the XIXth century. Anyway, I believe he was correct in some ways. At least in the way that women control men. Sometimes. Most of them. Most of the times :-) It takes only strong characters to oppose the natural instinct of fornication... I mean love, in men at least.

And about this, I watched a very pensive reflection in an american movie series, that was something in the lines of: "I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal." (Detective Rust Cohle from True Detective).

This view, although it seems pessimistic and unromantic, holds some truth still. And I mean, we hear many times (last time was yesterday, while I was pawning one of my laptops, to get money to pay for my bills) if you haven't done this or that, you lived for nothing. And most of the times, the this or that thing is family and children. Or when it is not family and children is marriage. Or other shit... I mean stuff like that.

From this perspective then Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Friedrich Nietzsche were all just losers, that were not even capable for the most basic human functions: conceiving and passing on their genes. Or Plato. Lawrence of Arabia. Arthur C. Clarke. Howard Hughes. Beethoven. Tchaikovsky. Dali Lama. George Washington. D.H. Lawrence. Leonard (yes, that Leonardo, the DaVinci one). Michelangelo. Salvador Dali. Frida Kahlo. Chekhov. Schubert. Virgil. Poe. Proust. Hans Christian Andersen. Yves Saint Laurent. Samuel Becket. George R. R. Martin. Lewis Carroll. Virginia Wolf. Jane Austen. Bernardo Bertolucci. Christian Dior. Gus van Sant. Andy Warhol. Sandy Koufax. Paulo Coehlo. Francis Bacon. Hannibal. Houdini. Baudelaire. Robespierre. Kant. Copernicus. Lenin. Vivaldi. Versace. Armani. Eva Peron. Eva Gabor. Jack Kerouac. And so on, as I get tired.

For sure all these people mentioned above, did not get the true meaning of life, since they haven't had children. And any illiterate country girl that conceived at prepuberty age probably understood more than all of them put together. Not.

A very nice and intelligent explanation of life purpose I read it also from a book called The Selfish Gene. The author, Richard Dawkins, an ethologist and atheist among other things issued a theory (don't know if its his entirely, or only just refined and adapted from other sources): basically what he claims is that the whole purpose of life is passing on information. DNA is also a form of information (codified in the sequence of the 4 nucleotide bases, that is Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G) and Thymine (T)).

And from this point of view, the whole purpose of life is for the different genes to transmit over generations, so that the most fit and adaptable survive in the end. In a way this is like Darwin's theory of evolution, except that instead of talking about the individual, Dawkins goes a bit further at gene level. And who knows, maybe in the future we will discover that actually the unit of selection is not the individual, not even the gene, maybe it is the atom. Or the protons, neutrons and electrons. Or the quarks. Or whatever else it will be discovered by the scientist from the University of Dontknowanything.

Point is, this whole phylosophy about family and children being the whole reason of life it is completely accurate. For people whose only imagination is about how to make the scrambled eggs today in a way different from yesterday.

For me, who I don't even make scrambled eggs, the purpose of life and... I will give you now a secret, the secret of happiness is... good health and bad memory. That's it. Now you all can live happily ever after. That is if you manage to keep your health in good condition while at the same educate your mind to forget about things.

Me, for one, I am still working on it. Literally. I mean I am doing kinetotherapy for a while now and probably will do so for a pretty long while in the future as well. But on the mind level, I don't care that much about what happened that got me into this position. It water under the bridge.

Good thing the winter is almost over, spring is knocking on the door and so is my passport waiting to be used again. So, sun here I come. Point in life, ha, ha, ha. Beach please!