SETTING SAIL TO RAISE MONEY FOR CHARITY
A FLOTILLA of yachts and motor cruisers — including two of Hobart’s tall ships — were quite a sight on Friday as they sailed on the River Derwent to raise money for charity.
The vessels were taking part in the 30th Hobart Rotary Club Charity Sail Day. This year the club hopes to
raise more than $1m. Based at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, Sail Day also relies on the support of the Derwent Sailing Squadron, the Bellerive Yacht Club and the Motor Yacht Club of Tasmania.
Boat owners from all four clubs donate their vessels and time and Hobart businesses pay $990 to secure a yacht or motor cruiser for
about eight guests and enjoy a fully catered cruise down the River Derwent to a quiet bay in D’Entrecasteaux Channel.
The average fleet is about 45 boats involving about 400 participants from the Hobart business community.
Some of Hobart’s major food and beverage suppliers also contribute,
providing gourmet provisions, including pies, sandwiches, fruit, cheese, wine, beer and soft drinks, either donated or at discounted prices.
Money is also raised through the Sail Day Raffle. This year, prizes worth more than $18,000 were up for grabs.
Rotary Club of Hobart president
Belinda Jefferies said the event highlighted the generosity of Hobartians.
“It relies on so many contributors coming together, including food and beverage suppliers, boat owners and a wide range of Hobart businesses, some of which have been participating since the first event,” she said.
It is a bit late for me to tell you this and please keep it to yourself lest no one turns up for work on Monday.
But I suspect that there is no meaning of life. That’s not to say life has no purpose. We desperately fill our short lives with all manners of distractive purpose. Making money and spending it, accumulating stuff, supporting a football team, having kids, shooting ducks (or trying to save them) but in the end, despite all petty ambition, we die.
And that’s it.
There never was a coherent long-term meaning to our frantic time-filling activities. We were so busy getting and spending only to distract us from the void, from an awful truth we always suspected but were afraid to recognise: that there is no meaning.
I caught up with an old mate at a funeral recently and he told me, “Charlie, remember how when we were younger, I wanted so much to be rich.”
I did indeed. Once you would have been unwise to stand between my friend and a bag of money.
“Well now, thanks to the property market I am rich. I have as much money as I ever wished for. The only problem is now I am bloody old.”
I tried to be happy for my recently wealthy friend but the only thing that brightened my day was that the old bugger would be flat out trying to spend his money before he died.
Not much meaning there. Admittedly my friend had a new Mercedes convertible and a much younger girlfriend. Yet, Socrates reckoned. “He is the richest who content with the least.”
Pull the other one Socrates and drink up your hemlock.
Imagine if there really was a is meaning of life. Wouldn’t everyone endlessly discuss it.
But I spend a lot of time listening to what people say in cafes and pubs and they never talk about the meaning of life.
Nor do they discuss the probability of life’s long-term ‘meaninglessness’ and not just because it’s such a long and cumbersome word but because there is no fun in such serious contemplation.
We are nothing if not trivial beings.
The only people I know who affect to find meaning in life are the so called ‘Happy Clappers’ but they only talk about it in their church.
In the real world if they went on about what they believe as opposed to what they know, they would empty the room.
Faith-based meaning is so much more depressing than evidence-based pessimism.
“Better to grapple with the awful truth than to live in a fool’s paradise,” is the theme of a long line of pessimistic philosophers from Ancient Greece until today.
Although some in that long procession hedged their bets on the existence of God.
Voltaire hated the immorality of the Catholic Church, but he certainly had a buck each way when it came to the man in the sky.
Voltaire believed in a deity but in an age of wars and plagues, he doubted the deity believed in us.
Voltaire’s God cared not a jot about humanity.
So, what has changed?
We’ve still got the wars and plagues but in our era science has reached out across time and space to the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
And it seems the late great philosopher Kerry Packer might have been right when, brought back after a six-minute death, he said: “I’ve been to the other side and let me tell you, son, there’s f------ nothing there.
“There’s no one waiting for you, there’s no one to judge you so you can do what you bloody well like.”
I thought of KP’s brutal words this week when I listened to the sound of wind on Mars.
The rover Perseverance had travelled 400 million kilometres to record and send back to Earth the loneliest sound I have ever heard: the thin desolate sigh of a distant breeze rattling into a microphone as it passed over a bleak and barren landscape, which 4 billion years ago might have resembled Earth.
It was that doleful sound beamed across the Solar System this week that prompted my lugubrious meanderings. How did Mars get like that? And why?
And does the same fate await our wonderful little blue planet?
Those are the important questions which Perseverance has been sent to answer.
And there is an even bigger fish to fry if life once flourished in the Martian oceans. Evidence of previous life forms will remain there just as on Earth. And if Perseverance finds proof that life once occurred on Mars then human philosophy is about to experience a cosmic shift.
If complex organic life existed on Mars before the thinning of its atmosphere and the drying of its seas, then why not elsewhere in the universe?
And if complex life …. then why not intelligence, somewhere among the glittering infinity of stars?
In which case why the long face?
Surely there is someone out there who can help us with the meaning of life?
Please, somebody tell us we are not here only to turn Earth into the wreckage that is Mars.
While we are waiting for an answer from light years away, listen online to the baleful sound of wind on Mars.
Is it a message of meaning or is it a warning? Or is it both?
THERE NEVER WAS A COHERENT LONG-TERM MEANING TO OUR FRANTIC TIME-FILLING ACTIVITIES. WE WERE SO BUSY GETTING AND SPENDING ONLY TO DISTRACT US FROM THE VOID, FROM AN AWFUL TRUTH WE ALWAYS SUSPECTED BUT WERE AFRAID TO RECOGNISE: THAT THERE IS NO MEANING.