How do you know?

There are so many questions to be answered.  When I was a child I was constantly asking, "Why?" "How does that work?" and "How do you know?"

There are questions that I remember puzzling over.  I remember asking, "If God made people, who made God?" and "Why isn't it the same time in Australia?" There were other questions that I never really asked but still thought about often.  When my mum was having my sister I remember wondering how much having a baby must hurt, having just done a rather large poo.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could learn everything when you are a child and you wouldn't have to keep asking these questions?  Would you be content if you knew everything? There I go again, another question.  Sometimes I think my brain is going to explode with all the questions I have.  In fact, it might be happening as we speak, as there is a throbbing vein on my temple, that the Long Suffering Husband thinks is where my brain is escaping from the gap in my skull that I made when I dropped a Le Cruset casserole dish lid on it a few years ago.

It's half term and so I have even more time to think than normal.  I'm reading books and listening to radio 4 (which is brilliant but makes me ask more questions) and spending time with my Dad, who has always encouraged the asking of difficult questions. He never got cross, no matter how much I went on. Mum's eyes would glaze over, her brow would knit together and secretly wish she had a pram that faced in the opposite direction but Dad always discussed the possibilities. When I was a bit older than the, "Why are bananas yellow?" stage we would tackle the big questions, as we walked the dog around Lake Meadows lake. The philosophical questions that nobody will ever really know the answer to batted back and forth like the tennis balls on the court next to the bowling green.

These are the questions that are filling my night waking moments.

Questions like, "How do you know if you're asleep?", "Why is the process of dying so individual?", "Why can't you choose when you die?", "How do you know if something is a hallucination or not?", "How do I know if I'm really here and not just a figment of someone else's imagination?"

These are the questions that troubled the great philosophers, probably without keeping them up at night. Descartes said, "I think therefore I am." Not so great philosophers like me can only conclude, "I think therefore I am knackered."