I had a rather interesting thought present itself to me while I was standing in the tube today.

Recently a footballer on TV collapsed on the pitch due to heart problems and was rushed to hospital in a critical condition and has thus remained in one for the past couple of days. As I was standing in the tube, I glanced at a news headline which a seated passenger had, and on the back of the newspaper, the picture where in a companionate rather fitting display, a footballer semi-reveals his underlying shirt while partially removing his team shirt to show a hidden message printed beneath it. What was on the shirt was a plea that we pray for the injured player. A righteous and companionate pleas and one tends to reflect the compassion and heartfelt emotion that accompanies it.

Now, to shift aside the emotional goodness and well intend of this gesture, I pause to realise a few interesting things. The injured mans state is dire, it's happened and is real. The outcome will be real and it will be practical. Prayer doesn't seem to me to be a practical assessment or remediation of the mans condition, nor does it affect the outcome. Why do we feel that a concept like prayer is a practical was to assess and interpret this situation. Prayer is theory, invisible and a concept I think man along with other invisible concepts creates in his mind to substitute for what is unknown. But this substitution seems so right, I feel compassion towards the situation but also I cannot justify a practical reason for it, it has no place in physical reasoning and outcome in reality. That said, it must have a place for we identify with it, associate with it and feel it. It's not to be dismissed. But why is it there and why do we pay so much attention to it? It may appeal to human nature which is largely emotional and this defines a large part of who we are as a race. We love, nurture, hate and care: all emotional. So it seems to me that we invent compassion, give faith in emotional things and things that are like emotions : things that are invisible, that we feel such as prayer. Emotions I understand, prayer doesn't seem fitting as its no an emotion is like an emotion and I feel we deceive ourselves by giving lasting value to this pseudo-emotion in a way we give our other felt emotions.

And it makes me wonder what else humans have done in this way to build up an impression of themselves and the world around them. It Also seems to me that we are inventors, not only of material shapes and construction but of our own world, or perception of it - this I think no one being has done.

How much of everything that we know are of us? Is the meaning of life a scripture set in stone my a all supreme being, or is it a concept that man will make?

Interesting to consider how much power man perhaps has always had, and how we are defining the world around us, perhaps not only physically but how we as a species react to emotional circumstances and how these seemingly invisible qualities can lead us to thinking they can impact on real life events like death and recovery. I cannot for sure that it is wrong or right only that the unknown is peculiar and the peculiar is often the unknown.

Who is the boss in the universe?