~:: Small Existential Break ::~

Tomorrow is election day for us in the US. I can’t shake the feeling that tomorrow may be the beginning of the end of the world. I’ve been blogging a lot of warm fuzzy things these last months, partially because I’ve been living a warm and fuzzy life.  But I’ve been thinking too, thinking about a lot of things. I’ve even had a few epiphanies, none of which I’ve written down here (which is on my own laptop, in my journal file) or there (my blog).

Tonight I am thinking that freedom is not a right. It’s an undertaking, a job. And I am thinking that most things that end up being important in a human life are like that: living, loving, religion – a job, something you take on, something you accomplish. Over and over again. Every stinking day.

I think that you get more freedom or less freedom with every choice you make, every minute, a supply that’s constantly fluctuating, and that has little to do with governments. I’m not going to enlarge on that idea, though it would be easy to do so.

I can’t help but feel that we would be better off, we humans, if we still had an honest life – had to grow our own food, build our own houses – because we would learn from the beginning that you can’t wait around for someone else to do it for you.  You can’t just do the one thing you do well – honest or dishonest – and then throw slips of paper or little discs of precious metals (or their digital equivalent) at other people, so that they will do the building and the planting and the harvesting and the butchering for you.  We’d learn that if you do NOT build it, you will, in fact, have nothing. That if you don’t cause, you won’t get effect.

As they said in the movie ET, “This is reality, Greg.”

And we would be the stronger for our primitive and inconvenient situation, simplifying the problems, boiling them down to you either do it or you starve.  Maybe that would teach us entitled, fit throwing adults a little something. Humble us.  Cause us to concern ourselves with real things.  Not that I want to lose my toilets and refrigerators, beloved running faucets and computers. Not that I really want to live that way. It would be too good for me. But if that were the way things were, I probably wouldn’t live to find out if I’ve inherited my mother’s Alzheimer’s.

There is a lot of noise in this world.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Heck, I don’t even know what will happen tonight. We could go to sleep and wake up with the ocean in our basements. And it got honestly dark tonight at five thirty, a thing I would not find so disturbing if whoever bosses us hadn’t decided to play odd games with all the clocks all these years.

I hope that tomorrow will bring hope.

I know that I already have love. And since I never throw clothes I like away and I’m old enough not to give a hang what people think of how I look, I have enough clothes to ride out a rough time.  And the sky will still be the sky. Which, by end of the week, will be weeping white.

I am afraid. Tonight.

I’ll get over that. And I’ll somehow solve this problem with the ward Christmas Party conflict. And Christmas is a-comin’ and the geese are getting fat (that’s an English Christmas song). I still don’t know what I want to be when a grow up, but lately, I feel like I’ve been trying on a lot of hats.

I envy otters, who are born on land and move awkwardly there, but who, when they finally stumble into the water, suddenly come alive, shot through with knowledge of what they are and how to be it. I am still on land, and there is so much precious to me here, I’m not sure that finding my own self would be worth losing anybody else’s self. The people I love are really the air that I breathe. And I won’t lose them just because an economy implodes. Unless we all starve to death, which – from a spiritual point of view – would not be that bad a thing. And we certainly wouldn’t lose ourselves if we were all gone together.

I am expecting one heck of a party on the other side.  And no conflicts with that.

This is not an essay with a point, it’s a meandering musing, and it’s finished now.  Thank you for tuning in.