Possum Man and the Meaning of Life

I saw a billboard the other day for The Possum Man. I thought at first it was an ad for a new Hollywood blockbuster based on some comic superhero. Turns out it was just an ad for some guy who comes to your house to remove possums from your roof.

But it did get me thinking. Possums seem to thrive in the urban environment. The roof space of a house (as I can assure you from personal experience) makes a perfect nesting place for a family of possums, and the telecommunications cables we string up to facilitate our modern lifestyle make perfect tightropes on which they can show off the speed and dexterity which they developed as a species long before the advent of the telephone or the internet.

How is it that some species (ourselves included) seem to do so well despite our best efforts to make the world uninhabitable? I think it is the perfect example of "the will to live".
Life abounds and adapts and thrives and survives because that it is all it knows. Because survival is all that matters (to any creature made of matter). Life cannot be denied any more than it can be controlled. That is why it is called ‘wild’ life. And life (as Jay Griffiths asserts in her excellent book, aptly entitled ‘Wild’), is by its very nature, its very essence (the stuff of which it is made), wild. Plants will find a way to grow in almost any conditions. Animals will endlessly breed because they no know other way. Even people remain wild, despite society’s best efforts to tame them.

Society would confine all of us to boxes, be they offices, televisions or coffins. But individuals are not so easily contained; their imaginations run riot, their intellects remain free. People laugh and play and dance and make (wild) love, because that is the stuff of which life is made. The life of the mind as well as the body hates restriction of any kind, it instinctively yearns for freedom. This includes the freedom to laugh and to play. Be very wary of those who insist that a situation demands seriousness. It is, I suspect, no coincidence that humour and human sound so alike.

Also be careful of those who start talking about "the real world". Are they talking about the worthless bits of paper that we call money and then collectively imagine are actually worth something? Are they talking about shares that are traded online in a virtual world and which can go from being really valuable to virtually worthless within hours?

That is not the real world. The Real World has nothing to do with capital, although it definitely should be capitalised. The Real World is the world of the cycles of nature, of the life and death struggle of every living creature to survive, because survival is hard-wired into all living things. The Real World cares nothing for corporate branding and marketing strategies, for bureaucrats and their endless reams of paper, for politicians and the vanity of their continual polling and focus groups (mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most electable of them all?).

The Real World is a sensual world, a world where storms break and predators pounce and monkeys play games in the forest. Real life breathes and bleeds, it screams and dreams. And it does so because it is made up of matter. It can be seen and tasted, smelt and felt. And it is our grey matter (which matters most of all) that takes in all these sensations and interprets them as signs of life, of something that matters.

And what is life? Perhaps to answer this question we first need to answer another of life’s endless questions; what is death? Put simply, death is expiry, which comes from the verb “expire”, originally meaning to breathe out. Over time ‘expire’ came to mean ‘breathe one’s last’, or die. So if death is a lack of breath, life must be a fullness of breath. To breathe in was originally said to be to ‘inspire’ (now more commonly ‘inhale’). So life is inspiration. What a marvellous definition!

To inspire, to breathe in, is to draw not just breath but life into the body. Indeed, inspire is linguistically related to spirit – to be full of spirit is to be full of breath is to be full of life. And what a spirited definition that is. To be truly alive is to inspire. To breathe in life is to encourage others to want to do the same.

There are other words related in this word family to ‘spirit’ and ‘inspire’. Aspirational is what every Australian is these days if we are to believe the media and the politicians. “Lofty or ambitious desire” is what the Macquarie Dictionary tells us about aspiration.

Yet ‘aspirational’, like ‘aspire’, has its origins in the word ‘aspirate’, originally meaning ‘to breathe toward or upon’ (as all those flu-ridden people tend to do to you on the train). Yet to breathe toward or upon is to breathe out (expire) rather than to breathe in (inspire), thus making it more closely related to death than to life. I don’t know about you but personally I would rather be inspirational than aspirational.

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