17 December 2019
There are times when no matter how much I try to come up with a post nothing comes. Today I am on my third attempt. ‘Tis a sad thing to have some many ideas die on electronic paper. Maybe the better choice on such days is just to keep my thoughts to myself. Better to be thought a fool, than to prove it so in a unquestionable manner.
I tried to write about my lack of action toward Christmas obligations, but it just sounded like whimpering. I tried to write a bit on personal peace, but again it didn’t feel right. I ain’t no prophet or philosopher or song writer.
So today this space is just a list of observations. Today at the coffee shop the music is too loud for the holiday season. How loud is it? Well, it is bleeding through my ear buds. Right now my aural sphere is a clash of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Crosby Still Nash and Young. (CSNY is on my earbuds.) The Peppers are winning over the tight harmonies and conga drum backbeat.
At the table next to me two twenty something women are talking with passion about Scooby Doo’s origin story. One of them is gesticulating in ways that seem to imply she is scratching the Hanna Barbara dog’s ears. WTF? (And yes I hope those are invisible ears she is scratching).
Who really cares about an origin story for the mumbling doof of a dog? Unless you are writing a treatment for the next Scooby “Let Me Scrape the Money from your Pockets You Parents of Young Children” Doo movie, there are a hundred better topics to be talking about.
Outside the sun is out in full. It is not a cloudy, or a partly cloudy day. It is a fully sunny day. We don’t get money of these in mid-Michigan. We really don’t get many of them between November and March. But the sun today as it shines through the coffee shop windows is a delight. What I really, really want to do is my cat imitation. I want with all my soul to curl up on the carpet and let the warmth of the sun just bathe me.
My lunch hour is over now. So to finish this off I will offer one of the abandoned ideas. Feel free to offer suggestions as to where I should take it....
“For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” Baruch Spinoza
Ours is not a peaceful world, not now, probably not ever. As a result if we are to have peace it is something that we must individually create on the small scale. The peace we experience will have to be a personal experience, something we draft subjectively inside ourselves and something we create in those we live with and among.
So how do we get there? How do we find peace first for ourselves and then for the small part of the world we live in? And if peace holds within it a balance that requires justice be factored in, how do we get there in the environment that surrounds us now? I don’t want to abandon the light that the concept of peace is, but I am left with serious reservations about how I get there if I am living out my obligations to humanity in the storm of waste that is swirling around us in this country right now. [And this is where the idea died as Elton John and Leon Russell sang “Never Too Old.]
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