This life is horrible and makes no sense. I know that life and death are two sides of the same coin but why do some people have to suffer so much? This life is like the blooms on the lilies all around my yard. They are beautiful bursts of color perfectly shaped, but they are short lived. The petals whither, die, and fall off. This life’s cruelty makes me so angry but the anger quickly gives way to a deep sadness. No god that I can worship would participate in or allow this kind of blind cruelty. The only lesson I can take from it is to grab joy at any and every opportunity. Even in the midst of our darkest misery try to see the wondrous beauty that is existing simultaneously with the horror.
I am a patriot. I love this country. It’s a disappointing mess ruled by greed and discrimination but built into its foundation is room for hope and change. Living in the town that hosts the oldest 4th of July parade in the country is great. The 4th of July celebration reminds me of senior week in college. Those few days between the end of classes and graduation were filled with parties and friends every night. The 4th of July celebration has concerts every night, the orange crate derby, fireworks, a parade, a tennis tournament, and so many other events. All those events include spending time with friends. It’s a time outside of our normal reality. We don’t usually get to spend day after day with our friends. We’re too busy with work and other obligations.
It’s hard not to eat ice cream in the summer and it’s easy to drink too many beers on a hot summer afternoon after mowing the lawn.
I am highly entertained by musicians who make funny faces while they play their instruments. And while we’re talking about it, music is art in action. If you read a book or a poem or look at a painting, the work has already been done. The music was written without an audience but the performance of the music is a living thing existing for that moment in front of the audience.
I still love that summertime is baseball season.
There is no good and bad. There are only ups, downs, twists and turns that require a mindful navigator.
We don’t often see things this way but we can frame our interactions with the world and other people differently. I play tennis with a guy who can be a jerk. He likes to compliment his shots and laugh at or point out other’s misses. A few weeks ago he continued to hit high looping balls over the net to me and I continued to try to smash an overhead shot back. I kept missing. After a few of these exchanges, he laughed and said something about how he was luring me into those errors with his high shots. I didn’t respond. I wasn’t surprised by his point of view. But I saw it differently. We weren’t playing in a tournament or in a league match. There was nothing at stake. It was just practice. I am capable of hitting those overhead shots well. I’m capable of hitting a lot of shots on the court well, but the percentage of time that I actually do it is low. To me, he wasn’t luring me in, he was giving me chances to practice that overhead shot. Why I am telling you this? As parents we deal with repetitive behavior from our kids. And sometimes we adjust and handle it better as we repeat the cycle but sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we get frustrated that we’re in the same situation over and over again and it makes it even more difficult to keep our emotions in check and to handle it well. But what if we saw these behaviors from our kids like high lobs coming over the net in tennis? It’s just a chance for us to practice that shot. Damn, that changes things. To take this tennis analogy one step further…a big thing in tennis is to be able to leave the previous point in the past and move on to the next point. If you’re still feeling frustrated from the last point or down on yourself for making a mistake then you aren’t fully focused on the point that is about to be played. Any interaction with other people throughout our day that is annoying, frustrating or negative in any way can be like this. We wonder why someone said what they said or thought what they thought. We tell the story to the friend we see next or we go back to our coworker and complain about how the person acted. But what if we treated all these interactions like a point in a tennis match? What if we just immediately dropped it and created a blank slate to start the next interaction? We would feel better. The residual negative emotions from all these interactions would no longer be piling up on us. We’d be starting fresh every time instead and at the end of the day we’d probably feel lighter and less tired because we wouldn’t be carrying around that pile of negativity and frustration all day long.
“We’re living and working thru the collapse of an empire.” -AB That feels like an accurate statement to me. Anyone who works for a big company knows what a shit show these companies are. They don’t care about their customers or their employees. The CEO and executive board care about maximizing their bonuses and keeping the shareholders happy. Fun fact: Shareholders don’t give a shit about the company in any real way. They just want the stock price to go up or the dividend yield to go up. Letting their opinion determine how a company is run is a recipe for disaster. And how about the country in general? Have you looked at any headlines lately? It feels like the Earth is fighting back against us dumb humans trying to eliminate us. The news and media outlets haven’t been interested in serving the public by providing facts and information for a long time. They are interested in clicks and ratings. They show us the extremes of human behavior and the extremes of social/political ideologies. Those extremes, on both sides, are scary. It appears that no one with any power, whether it’s political power, monetary power or media power, cares about anything but their own selfish agendas. We’re in a predicament. We have access to so much information and we can see the facts laid before us. It doesn’t seem like a big exaggeration to conclude that we are speeding toward Armageddon. But we are mostly powerless. It’s like being a citizen of the Roman Empire. Who cares about the drama among leadership in Rome when it’s so removed from what matters in our daily lives? Their bullshit seems so meaningless and unimportant. And most of our “leaders” aren’t likable, believable, or trustworthy. So, we are simultaneously spectators and participants in the collapse of the American Empire but we have no real power to prevent the collapse.