Can you
believe this? Some 400 years before Jesus was born, a man said this:
“Someday,
in the distant future, our grandchildren’ s grandchildren will develop a new
equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with
fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between
light and knowledge.”
--Plato (PLATO’S
DOCTRINE: 909 Relics of Greek Philosophy).
Reality is so compelling. It has so much momentum going
it’s hard to stop or change direction.
Brother, are you having a problem with life these days?
Maybe it’s just me.
I was cruising along pretty well, not worried, then I
felt something was bearing down on me. Yes, I know better. I know that when you
are resonating with the good, you feel good. When you focus on the dire, the
dangerous, the sick, you feel down, depressed, complaining, or just off-kilter.
So, how do you lift yourself up when something knocks you
off-kilter?
When I realized that we don’t know what to believe
anymore. I see that people believe lies, and we don’t know who is telling them
to us and why. I saw that someone can drop a dire something on us, an
insinuation, and not even sign their name to it, and what happens? It becomes
spread into society. People glom onto the sick and disgusting.
It has something to do with the way our brains work, how
we can’t stop looking at a train wreck. It gets the adrenaline up—hell's bells,
take a roller coaster ride, that will get the adrenaline up too.
We know that fear sells. Fear keeps us off-kilter. Fear
makes us uncontrollable, but we can’t help it. Fear runs us. We let the media,
and who knows what all, to affect us. I read that Memes are driving our
culture. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram--these are all windows for us to peer
into. When people have death, sickness, unrest, unemployment thrust into their
face for over a year, it wears on them. We weren’t built to live under constant
threat.
Darn, I was looking out the wrong window. I have a
philosophy about which window to choose—this is all figurative, you know. One
window shows kids playing in the street, riding their bikes, and laughing.
Another shows the neighbors quarreling. Some windows even look out upon
downright fighting.
And then I approach my kitchen window—this is real—and
there is an orchid growing on the sill that has sent up a new spike and is budding.
This is its third year to bloom. Maybe because it is looking out the window to
the maple tree in the back yard that is bare now of leaves, but the tree and
the orchid believe that spring will come and with it baby silky leaves that
will flutter in the backyard.
We have to focus on the good, the healthy, the beautiful.
We came here for a reason, and it wasn’t to suffer. We
thought this time on Earth would be a grand vacation, a joyous one, so why
isn’t it? Has the outside world done it to us? Could it be that our belief in
suffering and decline has been passed down from generation to generation? Well,
folks, now is the time to stop it.
Now is the time, as Ralph Marston wrote, To “Breathe in
the sweet air of limitless possibility and make life as rich as you know it can
be.”
Breath wrote Dido Owlnute:
“To pause
To make space
To collect your thoughts,
To remember,
To face the next moment,
To choose.”
“Remember, you made it this far through
difficulties that seemed impossible. Remember how many times you were saved at
the last minute—this time is no different.”—Bryant
McGill.
“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy. They are
the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” --Marcel Proust
I came upon this picture, taken in Greece, of my daughter
at 16. It is a beautiful window to look upon. She wasn’t posing but just
standing there, and I snapped the picture.
“Truth isn’t always beauty. But the hunger for it
is.”—Nadine Gordimer.
