A piece of the Huxley pie

Today, despite having been a member of the library for over a year and a half, I actually, genuinely, honest-to-goodness got some books out for the first time. Not that your average passer-by would guess this about me, but I'm quite a nervy person, a worrier by blood and petrified of the socially incorrect. So, I was playing an internal game of chicken with myself. But my decisive self won out and I took my choices over to the desk, ready for the judgey-looking clerks behind the desk to judge me with their judgey eyes. But they completely failed to notice my paltry fair and the whole event passed totally uneventfully.

Ten minutes later, as I sat in the park - back against my increasingly favourite tree, chomping my apple, trying to ignore the slight, but persistent, smell of dog's mess - I commenced my first book. In a bid to broaden my literary horizons I'm trying not to default to chick-lit with inevitable happy endings, so I went in the opposite direction with Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception". For a first-time reader of his work, this is perhaps a bit of a bizarre choice because rather than one of his, no-doubt brilliant, novels, it's a short piece recounting his experience of taking mescalin.

I began with the foreward by J.G. Ballard, and I stumbled when I came across this passage: "Huxley believed that our brains have been trained during the evolutionary millenia to screen out all those perceptions that do not directly aid us in our day to day struggle for existence. We have gained security and survival, but in the process have sacrificed our sense of wonder."

Well. Speaking as a recently ex'd student, who is, quite frankly, retreating further into an self-imposed sense of denial disguised as imagination, I can safely say that my brain constantly throws things into my path that impede my daily struggles. This normally goes something like:
Brain: those library clerks glared at you when you came in, escape! Escape before they inevitably yell at you and publicly shame you for not being dressed appropriately for the library/for breathing too loudly/ for existing in their domain
Me: but I came here to get books. I want to read something improving this afternoon.
Brain: but they look scaaaaary, and you could just lie in bed!
Me: dude, we played that card yesterday.
Brain: but you liked laying in bed. It was comfy.
Me: yes, but I achieved bugger all....Nope, I'm braving it, I'm going to get these books out.
Brain: don't say I didn't warn you.

Yup, I am that neurotic. And I know I'm not alone. However, I can't help but agree with the second part of Mr Huxley's credo. I am in essence, secure and surviving but ultimately bored and unoccupied. I've lost my sense of wonder. This is what I want to rediscover.

And so from Huxley to pie. Today's attempts at recapturing wonder included making cherry pie from scratch. It's cooling in the tin as I write this. It is wonky, probably quite bland and possibly inedible, but wonderful all the same.