Archives for category: Free Will

Moments come and go. Whatever shit you’re having to wade through in life, it’ll pass. You can, of course, slow that process down some, by clinging to misery. I don’t recommend it. Take a breathe. Relax. Be in this moment, and let that one go.

Sometimes the flowers are tucked away behind the vines.

Sunny days come and go. Rainy ones, too. I’m just saying; this, too, shall pass. That’s real. Take a breath. Have a cup of coffee. Walk in the fresh air, among the trees, or under broad open skies.

“Human” isn’t always easy. Actually, quite the opposite seems to be the case; being human often seems needlessly difficult. Worse – we choose the difficulty level on the game of life, more often than we realize we do. We make specific, considered, deliberate choices to make the game so much harder. I’m not sure why that is. We could each do things quite differently than we often do…

…You can begin again. Let it go. Breathe. Start over. Just a thought.

My coffee is good. This moment is deliciously quiet, and gentle. Morning has not yet really gotten going. I’m okay with taking that slowly.

We each walk our own hard mile. We often don’t notice others suffering, and have little ability to place the suffering of others in the context of suffering generally; our own pain often feels like the worst pain, ever. “No one else could ever understand how bad this is…” We isolate ourselves from the support we are seeking, forgetting how common most of these human experiences actually are. We sometimes choose to withhold compassion and kindness, because we aren’t receiving it, ourselves. It’s weird how that works.

I sip my coffee and consider The Big 5. Respect. Reciprocity. Consideration. Compassion. Openness.

I could do better.

It’s time to begin again.

I made the mistake of reading the news headlines this morning. I was fortunate, I think, that they were in general so disappointing (I mean, seriously reducing my fondness for humanity, the longer I scrolled), that I didn’t bother to read more than one or two articles. Fucking hell. Maybe save the news bullshit for after the coffee next time?

Better than “news”.

It was less that the news itself was specifically “good” or “bad”, and more that… omg… human beings are such unreserved colossal dicks to each other! Cruel. Petty. Irritable. Self-righteous. Territorial. Deceitful. This morning’s news feed amounted to a serious disappointment – in humanity. Just, overall. Fuck.

Day-to-day squirrels observably treat each other better than human beings treat each other.

Do better, humanity, for fucks’ sake, please just do better. We’re killing each other, destroying the planet we live on, sowing discord instead of feeding the world, fomenting war, elevating gossip, undermining science, promoting lies as truth, and just generally being fucking dickbags all the damned time. We can do better.

…I can do better. This is my own fault every bit as much as it is yours. We each have a share in this mess, however small you may think your share is… you’ve still got a piece of this madness. Fix your fucking mess. I’ll work on fixing mine. If we could each be convinced to heal our racist/sexist/ageist/able-ist/xenophobic bullshit tendency to divide our world into in-groups and out-groups, and vile us vs. them foolishness… we might actually build a world fit to live in. I’m so exhausted from being astonished and outraged. I’m so bored and frustrated with being angry about it.

I can still do better. The verbs pile up, don’t they? The Big 5 are a good fit here: Respect, Reciprocity, Consideration, Compassion, and Openness. Yeah, those are practices, and grammar notwithstanding, manage to be substantially very verb-y. What I’m saying is we’re making choices to be what we are, each of us, every day, all of us, all the time.

…And it’s time to begin again. Do better.

 

I’m feeling a bit puzzled and frustrated this morning. I feel quite certain that I’ve forgotten something I meant to do this morning, before I head to work. It’s certainly no where to be found in my recollection this morning, and I’m more than a bit aggravated. I didn’t sleep well, and it’s likely that the poor night’s sleep has degraded my memory in some small way, and whatever I thought I’d adequately reminded myself of, last night, and put off for the morning, is now only a recollection that there had been something to recall. So annoying.

I sip my coffee and give myself over to happy contemplation of the lovely weekend just past. In doing so, I remember, rather suddenly, the thing I had forgotten; a one word edit on yesterday’s post. LOL How did that feel so important? Is that really the thing I had forgotten, or just something that satisfies that urge to take care of some needed task? Now my memories of a weekend well-spent mingle with thoughts about how memory works (and doesn’t), in a sort of lazy, unproductive swirl of thinking. Colorful. Without obvious purpose.

…Damn, I hope I got enough sleep to work skillfully, this morning. lol

I give myself over to coffee drinking and skimming the headlines in my news feed (in most cases, there is no point to reading the articles). I let myself wake more fully before considering whether to drive in or take the light rail. (Light rail seems to be winning…) It was a luscious, wholly appreciated long weekend… I enjoy the thought of it. I could sit here and sip coffee and contemplate the weekend quite contentedly for the next little while or so, but, it’s already Tuesday and it’s already time to begin again. 🙂

 

Today I pause to acknowledge the fallen. I consider the friends and comrades at arms who did not come home. I make a personal accounting of the cost of war. The price of war is high. The sacrificed men and women were precious – how many could have truly changed the world? War doesn’t change improve much of anything, only increases the amount of blood we have spilled for the sake of someone else’s vanity, profiteering, or arrogance. Wrapped in patriotic language, we accept slaughter as necessary – so long as we don’t have to look too long, too closely, to too honestly upon it. We accept the justifications. We accept the fear-mongering rhetoric. We look the other way when death comes for someone else’s daughters and sons.

I came home. Some did not. Over time, a great many did not come home. The numbers are horrifying. Add in the innocents – the children, the civilians, the people attempting to flee war, the people attempting to survive, the countrymen upon whom the governments have experimented for further gains in later wars – and the numbers become unfathomable, and impossible to truly grasp. We are killers, and we are fairly indiscriminate about it. So, here on the calendar is this one day. One day to account for our murderous inexcusable rage, our “patriotic” defense of our arbitrary borders, and our willingness to slaughter the daughters and sons of parents we’ve never met, and who have done us no harm – and our future potential. We’ll kill it all, but hey, at least we take a memorial day to observe… what? Our glory? The wastefulness of our violence? The passing of innocence? Probably not. More likely, we’ll take a long weekend to barbecue, and the most notable concern of the day will be the temperature of the grill, and whether the sauce is the same as what our father made, and will it rain?

Please enjoy the feast, and be merry. Sure, why not? Please also take a moment to consider the cost – the price paid in blood, by countless lost moments of a future we’ll never see, counted in bodies. Take a moment to consider who won’t be at the barbecue, this year or ever. You owe that moment to them, today.

I am sitting quietly, sipping coffee, on a Sunday morning. Does’t feel like “the end of the weekend”, because it isn’t; I’ve got tomorrow off for the Memorial Day holiday. This feels, instead, like a proper “day of leisure”, and I am enjoying it quite gently. Perhaps I’ll garden later? For now, I am reading emails, reading the news, and contemplating questions. Big questions, small questions – there are a ton of questions worth asking. Many of them have achievable answers worth having, some of them have more power and enlightenment to offer in the asking, itself. To sort out which are which, I sit idly, asking the questions, considering the answers, and hoping to know more at some point in the future than I do right now, or at least to gain the wisdom to recognize sufficiency, even in the realm of knowledge.

Maybe I “get there”, maybe I don’t; either way, this is a good cup of coffee. 🙂

Be present. Listen deeply.