Setting priorities

In my personal life I find a lot of diffuculty in setting priorities. All the things one would like to do - all the things that have to be done - and each new day seems shorter than the last (probably partly due to getting old).

Enterprises that I began with enthusiasm become like rivers running into sandy desert and disappearing. That seems to be the case at present with my putting up and improving my web pages on the internet, and even with my interest in general in the potentials of my computer. This will probably change with time. I usually, eventually, come back to things that I've started.

Being on the internet and with broadband will certainly become more important in terms of playing a newly (and somewhat accidently) bought computer game. While I will need to help and monitor what goes on, the game activity itself will probably be more undertaken by my grandson than by me. Anyway, I'm not at all sure that this is the right kind of prioritizing for me to have let myself in for.

Actions with consequences that one might later regret - carrying on with them may not seem a high priority, but they are there nevertheless, demanding a share of time and attention. For the present I am absorbed in - and enjoying! - rewriting a novel I wrote in the late 1970. It was a quite well-researched attempt, but pretty badly constructed and ran into far too many pages so that it was left unfinished.

The question of priorities, and the values associated with setting priorities, is also a crucial one in the life of the collective - the town, the region, the nation, the whole of the modern planetary 'civilization' of mankind. As might be gathered from my web site, I have a lot I would like to say and have debated on this! But ... (with a shrug) "Whatever". As far as fundamental change is concerned, history weighs heavily on the human subconscious. In a country like New Zealand, many quite informative and reasonable debates and presentations of ideas happen over 'adjustables', but most people and the media are extremely reluctant to tackle the 'nitty-gritty' and put forward radical ideas and debates on 'fundamentals'. Like the problems now being debated on water quality - a problem which has to be tackled at the source, this is true also of so many even more fundamental problems - pollution, overuse of resources, enshrinement of 'greed', rich extravagance verses poor need, overpopulation ...