Troubles are the only thing you can take with you everywhere. Is it not interesting that you cannot even keep the essentials for survival, (food, water), with you under all conditions, and yet troubles you can. You cannot carry enough water to survive indefinitely in a desert, but you can have with you forever the troubling mental images of the people responsible for you being there.
Troubles are not the same as problems. Problems threaten your physical wellbeing; troubles bother your mind. Problems can be solved; troubles only “dealt with” (as ‘tis called). The more head-oriented you are, of greater significance seem troubles, even to the point of primacy over problems. Most reading this have no problems, only troubles. Starving, homeless, ill and besieged refugees have problems.
The obvious original purpose of troubles was to be a tool to deal with problems. To mentally trouble over a lack of water for your fields could lead to your suddenly picturing the digging of irrigation ditches from a nearby river. But when you are not faced with any such actual problems, in what activity does your mind’s ability to be troubled engage? When no lion is in sight, gazelles will stand around bitching and complaining about sports, politics, declining moral values, and just generally running the numbers on one and all.
A reasonable view as to why our most “intelligent” organ continually occupies itself in such a vacuous activity, would be that when not faced with eminent problems, the brain/mind starts churning up troubles as a means of staying in shape and being prepared for their potentiality. This would give pragmatic legitimacy to this otherwise pointless exertion. There is also the fact that ordinary people raise no objection to the situation, in fact take no specific note thereof (except in extreme cases where the troubles in the mind reverse the above and become a detriment to the body’s wellbeing).
People so suffering, are judged by their peers to then be ”mentally ill,” but this is not the norm. Everyday people take the constant non extreme troubles constantly churning in their mind for granted. They seem justified; they seem natural, and go largely unnoticed. Ordinary men take troubled-consciousness to be consciousness. Creatures born breathing sulfur dioxide can but take its odor as the atmospheric norm.
J.