First Thoughts
… in the end we all fail… we fail because we all die and staying alive has been the point all along…
… last night i found myself wishing i had the energy to write an end of day journal entry… it seems days should begin and end with some thoughts about how things are, how things went and how i hope they might go tomorrow… or perhaps some commentary on the political shit show… or perhaps i will have read or accomplished something significant…
… which i did in the sense that whenever you keep life in order something significant has happened…
… yesterday i got up, wrote in my journal, read and wrote in my journal some more, went for my photowalk, made breakfast, sorted out some bill paying issues, edited some photographs, did the laundry, did some more photo editing, made a lovely and very tasty dinner… then we watched a couple of episodes of Maid, a Netflix series we like… except, i get really frustrated with the young woman protagonist who’s life continuously falls apart as soon as it’s put together… she makes bad choices (as much as i know free will is a questionable proposition, it seems i continue to believe there are choices to be consciously made)… almost everyone in her life is a disaster and their disasters constantly overtake her too… last night i had to turn it off i got so angry with her… when i like a program series i get emotionally invested in the characters… i especially get invested in characters struggling against the odds, the underdog characters — i know, me and the rest of humanity — who triumph in spite of all the beatings they take from the cosmos because, never-the-less, they persist and something does come of it…
… i suppose human mythology contains plenty of warnings that in life we don’t prevail… Job or Sisyphus, or just plain every man or woman as represented by Willie Loman in death of a salesman and Blanche DuBois in streetcar named desire…
… this hero’s journey thing is pretty engrained in our psyches… i expect it has a survival of the species purpose… we all need to see ourselves as heroes prevailing against the cosmic headwinds of life… except, so many of us get to the end and we are disappointed with the results of our efforts… we ask ourselves what it all meant and the answer to that question is not satisfying… i wonder if it is any more satisfying for an individual who can say their lives truly made a difference to humanity, Einstein, Jonas Salk, Newton, Simone De Beauvoir… maybe not… in the end we all fail… we fail because we all die and staying alive has been the point all along…
… when i review my life i realize i have generally had it good… i have never been destitute… i didn’t and don’t live in a war torn or third world country (yet)… i have made choices that didn’t go well, but always struggled with the results and turned them out as well as i could which was generally in a positive direction…
… at this place in my life my only big complaint is that it should have meant more in the grand scheme of things… my minor complaint is that i was saddled with a very inadequate human being for a father… the repercussions of that were extensive though M and siblings put the better face on it… M observed to me recently that we were “such polar opposites”… we were… how’s that for bad Karma?… to be saddled with a child who’s every choice in life seems to be a repudiation of the way you lived yours?… i suppose it’s something of an accomplishment to get to a place where i accepted there would never be a decent relationship between us, and there never was…
… the HCR meter today was in positive territory i suppose… the debt ceiling got raised, the stock market rebounded, there continue to be revelations about January 06, 2021 and 45’s administration… i would like to believe there will be accountability in the end, but 45’s impeachment trials put an end to my belief in our republic’s ability to enforce consequences on the rich and/or powerful… the system is rigged in their favor and exists principally to keep the common folk in order…