Eggs are the new celery

I spoke with DC today by phone and later we e-mailed each other. Lovely exchange and great to speak with each other. Then off I went to the shops for food. One has to adjust to buying for one not two. I bought eggs only to get back and find a load in the fridge. Years ago it was always celery I seemed to end up with too much of. DC coined the expression '---is/are the new celery' for my buying food I had failed to remember we had.

So lunch settled; boiled eggs. I've added a photo of the egg cup, a classic; 1960's, stainless steel. Beautiful. To use DC's words I am just an old fashioned modernist. Form follows function. Except of course that the reverse also holds. And here is my segue, it's form I want to write about.

We have two of these egg cups and I think they are DC's, but they could be mine. I recall that we had such at home when I was a kid and so a bit like the sweets you have at that age, they seem like they always were and any new type that one remembers being introduced, well, they are some newfangled thing. Readers of a certain age will recall Marathon chocolate bars. But I digress. Or do I? We live in the realm of form. Form shapes us and we shape the forms we see. I think that there is a complex symbiosis at work here. Consider the eggcup, it has had a useful input to my day. This gives it meaning to me. Now I could spend time writing about interconnectedness; everything that needed to come together to make the eggcup, that I create the image I perceive with my senses, etc. but that would be an exploration of the emptiness of form. That's not quite where I am going with this. I am thinking about the slightly more subtle aspects of form; our approach to our being.

By now you will have a bit of picture of my day. STOP. Recall your day. What shaped it? Did it need to be that way. What way could any day be for you, for me? Here we are faced with choice. What has meaning for us? What state (of mind) do we feel comfortable with? What is feeling? What is thought? What is what? Is what thought? I think so. to ask 'what?' is a thought. And we think in forms. And that let's us cross the road, go shopping and boil eggs. Oh, and develop huge bodies of technical, scientific and cultural knowledge. Amazing. But not the whole of reality. No? No. So we need consider our beliefs because our beliefs affect how we live; the form of our lives. All forms are empty but I do not think that takes away our choice, our responsibilities, our joys. It is probably what generates them. Which is a nice way to start to consider the difficult question of free will but that's an other post. What I am driving at here is the extent to which our lives are the forms and choices we make. Eggs or soup?