—Attention, and the Mercy of the Unexpected Gift
—A Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Field Reflection
—by The Accidental Initiate:
I used to think absurdity meant nonsense. Something broken. Something that mocked meaning rather than revealed it.
But that isn’t quite right.
The word absurd comes from the Latin absurdus—literally, “out of tune,” “out of harmony.” Not meaningless, but misaligned. A note struck where you didn’t expect it. A chord that doesn’t belong—until, somehow, it does.
Most of life is not absurd. Most of life is automatic.
We wake up, perform the rituals, say the approved phrases, walk the well-worn grooves. Colin Wilson wrote about this condition—the robot state—where consciousness idles while behavior continues. Not evil. Not tragic. Just—sleepwalking competence.
And then, occasionally, something happens that doesn’t fit.
Something small. Something unnecessary. Something funny.
A baseball player named Larry Cox is nicknamed Larry by his teammates—not because there are too many Larrys, but because he looks like Larry Fine of the Three Stooges.
His name becomes his nickname.
No extra information is added. Nothing is clarified. And yet the mind lights up.
Why? Because the world briefly stops behaving like a filing cabinet and starts behaving like a joke that knows it’s a joke.
That moment—tiny, inconsequential, absurd—snaps us out of the robot trance. We laugh, not because it’s clever, but because it’s true in a sideways way. Reality winks.
Absurdity, in this sense, is not an enemy of meaning. It is a disruption of deadness.
That’s why it feels almost… merciful.
In a world that pressures us to optimize, streamline, and comply, absurdity arrives like an unsolicited reminder:
There is more going on than your habits can account for.
A rock wearing a suit.
A tree with a brain for a crown.
A banana peel placed precisely where it shouldn’t be.
A name that collapses into itself.
These things do not explain the world—but they re-enchant attention.
Which is why I’ve come to suspect that absurdity is not merely comic. It may be a form of grace.
Not grace as exemption from effort, but grace as interruption. A gentle shove—uphill, perhaps—by something older, wider, and more patient than our routines. A reminder that intelligence did not fall from the sky fully formed; it emerged from matter, slowly, awkwardly, absurdly.
When absurdity enters our lives, it does not say “nothing matters.”
It says, “You’re not finished seeing.”
And that is good news.
So the Council proposes something modest, almost embarrassingly so:
Make Absurdity Fun Again.
Not as chaos.
Not as mockery.
But as an invitation to wake up.
Because whenever the world briefly stops making sense in the expected way, it may be offering us the rarest gift of all:
The chance to notice that we are still alive inside it.
Council Note
Beginning with this issue, MAFA — Make Absurdity Fun Again will appear as a recurring Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists column.
MAFA is devoted to the identification, preservation, and gentle celebration of absurdity in its constructive form: moments when reality slips its routine, names refuse to behave, symbols misalign, and ordinary life briefly reveals a deeper strangeness beneath the surface.
In an age increasingly dominated by automation, habit, and procedural thinking, MAFA will document those small disruptions—comic, coincidental, or quietly surreal—that interrupt the robot state and restore attention.
Absurdity, properly understood, is not the absence of meaning but an invitation to notice that meaning has more room than we assumed.
The Council considers this a public service.
***
[Source Code for Larry/Larry is from, What’s In A NAME, Reflections Of An Irrepressible Name Collector, by Paul Dickson]
COUNCIL-OF CONCERNED-CONSERVATIONISTS…..Between Jest And Earnest….. 
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