S Sorrensen
Lillian Rock. Wednesday, 7.20am
Supposedly, we live in a rational world. Rationality is logic. Logic is the basis of science. And this is the scientific age.
Newton made the laws of the world rational and universal. (Einstein made them incomprehensible and magical.) I can communicate instantly with New York via a plastic slab in my pocket, cars can park themselves, and nuclear reactions can be harnessed to produce goods ranging from robot vacuum cleaners to cluster bombs.
I take the plastic slab from my pocket. I don’t text New York; I take a photo of Wollumbin. It squats like a scrub turkey in the centre of the caldera nest.
Clouds scud about it, but it’s motionless. I like that. As the 200 billion galaxies speed away from each other, as the 100 billion stars of our galaxy whip around its dark centre, as the Earth races around the nearest star, as the North Coast spins giddily to face that sun, as I bolt from one place to another, the mountain sits like, well, a rock. Immobile. Unmoved. Yeah, I like that.
So I stopped my car, to be still with it.
There is reason, and then there are the emotions. Stupid irrational emotions. They are the cause of unchecked rage, unlikely romance and uncontrollable tears. None of which is of much use in designing self-parking cars.
My world is currently driven by emotion. And when I say ‘driven’, I don’t mean keep-to-the-speed-limit, drive-to-conditions type of driving; I mean a demolition derby. My world is a rusty Monaro with an overheated engine, no brakes and unpredictable steering.
(For the record, dear reader, this is a metaphor. Beside me, as I suck in the stolid serenity of the mountain, is my trusty Superoo, ticking away the seconds as its Japanese technology cools in the morning air. It is driven safely, has regular servicing, and is as about exciting as a PM’s speech.)
The Stoics of ancient Greece (around 3BC) believed that emotions were a hindrance to attaining a happy life. Keep your emotions at bay, stay calm, and you’ll be fine. Right now, I have a feeling they may’ve been be right. I am not calm.
I have interrupted my journey from one emotional situation (Brisbane) to another (home) to contemplate this rock. It called to me. It waved down the metaphoric Monaro, flashes of bare rock showing through its skimpy skirt of vegetation. Now, I stare at her.
Wollumbin doesn’t dance to the unpredictable pulses of passion. It just stays there. It’s a volcanic plug whose only movement in the last 23 million years, has been to shrink and weather, like an old person. Around it the world has changed. But, always, the rock…
Aristotle, three hundred years before the Stoics, had a different view about emotions. They did not hinder reason, he declared, but created it.
Emotional is the human state. We created a phone that can text New York so we can send a love note tinged with desperate hope. We created sophisticated photographic technology so we take a pic of a baby eating mud.
Rationality is a nuclear plant on a fault line, a self-parking car in a traffic jam, a cluster bomb in a child’s hand.
Perhaps reality is emotional rather than rational. Maybe love warps time and space (Einstein). Even staid old Wollumbin was born of igneous passion. Twenty-three million years ago, the huge Tweed volcano rumbled with a geological fervour and blew its top.
Wollumbin is not stoic stone; it’s a memory of fiery fervour.
Life is not rational; it’s barely controlled chaos with some good bits.
Contemplation complete, the Monaro skids back into the rough and tumble of the derby.
The Subie, seat belts on, indicates, and gently rolls back onto Kyogle Road.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
