There is nothing like living a full life, making millions of mistakes, forgetting who you are in relationships and having significant people in your life die to open your eyes to love. By love I mean all forms, opening your heart and mind to every small fucking lovely moment when the wind blows just so or the light falls across a table or you are laughing with someone about silly ideas that get so outrageous neither of you cannot stop even to breathe.
Choose a topic, just one, and you will quickly see that the possibilities for exploration and understanding, for combining old and new ideas or ways of doing things are endless. From this vantage point, you have worlds at your fingertips, unlike, to some extent before the explosion of technology and the sharing of everything from viral cat videos to online suicide prevention support groups, to name two.
We have become, more or less, depending on your particular lifestyle, ultimate consumers of experiences that once were possible only if you actually put on a coat and walked to the pub, the butcher's, or to visit your Granny. Add trains, buses, subways, cars and planes and people began relocating in staggering numbers depending on famine situations, bad dictators, war, or the need to start fresh if you were wanted for a crime.
If you talk with a substitute teacher who made it through Auschwitz with their number still tattooed as proof or an old soldier who fought at The Battle of the Bulge, they show an amazing appreciation not only for Life but a healthy attitude towards the past and a concern for the world now, as well as wonder regarding the future even though they may not be here.
The little daily bothersome things that bog down many of us are waved or whisked away with the gesture of one hand, wrinkled, worn, age-spotted, with or without jewelery as if a fly or pesky mosquito had tried to land to suck some precious blood. As if our bodies, without our help, cannot make more blood when we need it under normal circumstances. How self-centered we can be, God help us.
I fall into these same traps on a daily basis. I'm no saint by a long stretch and would be the first to list my own shortcomings, but recently I've become more attuned to the absolute waste of time and energy that builds up, so am working hard to be in a mindset that is bringing me back to when less was worth more.
phrase from Paul McCartney's Mull of Kintyre
IN