Friday, March 1, 2013

Vis a vis iPhones left at work that disappear, traced to a certain neighborhood, but thievery denied, the boss of a small restaurant, asks that we move on, not wanting a dark cloud hanging over the place.  "Let's just not talk about it."  And for the psychology of the place, that's probably a good idea.  You move on.

Do you ever wake up with a dark cloud hanging over you?  Yeah, well, I seem to.  Had that feeling for about 25 years, actually.  Something unresolved.  You wish you could do something about it, but you can't.  25 years ago you could have, but your idiot buddies distracted you when you were due for a meeting.  And what can you do about it now?  It would be ridiculous even to pretend for a moment that you could.  Too much water  under the bridge anyway.  Times change, people change, commitments are made, directions are taken.  You count your blessings, and move on.  You were a decent person, acting decently, just got confused.  Maybe some form of ADD.  The only thing that, it's hard to forget it all, and it causes a lingering air of being unresolved.

And perhaps this is where the tactful genius of Buddha's simplicity has a place.  Remove desire, and you remove suffering.  An important lesson in life.

Sometimes in life, it seems heavily to be the case of Murphy's Law.  If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.  If you don't leave something protected for a moment, someone will come along and steal it. And this is the horrible truth behind things like the death of President Kennedy, that if, for one moment, he is not completely protected, boom, he is gone and then there's nothing you can about it.  It's simply randomness, the billion egos all clawing for something they want, taking away the things of other people in multitudinal acts of selfishness and strange will.

The wiser of us realize such things earlier.  They come to regard people in a negative way, about to be incompetent often enough, except for the rare few that you can count on.  And so they nail things down, take responsible action, don't leave things up to the whims of the gods and personalities, nor allowing for the sanctity of art to let things all come out in the wash.

And then, I suppose, there is art.

Moods are products of our chemistry, the quarks, the quirks, the physical adjustments our systems make and take.   To a great extent, we are just born the way we are.  Some are happy, some are smug, some are prone to melancholy, some need the juice of adrenaline to keep them on even keel.  Some are fighters, believing in their own righteousness, and some aren't, prone more toward reflection or the curse of being a sensitive guy.  And all of us are trapped, really, in our little systems, sometimes within the ticking time bombs of our personal chemistry.  Which of course does not excuse anyone from being a pedophile or a murderer, rapist, what-have-you.  Some people like incessant chit-chat.  Some are self-serving.

Well, anyway, you find a little bit of a rhythm in your daily life, and odd as it is to maybe someone else, if it works for you, you keep at it.

When I'm at a loss, I lay down on the rug and look up at the ceiling.  I guess it's a form of meditation.  I think of the opening of Islands in the Stream, where Hemingway gives us a self-portrait of a man staring the fire in his fireplace, the driftwood of Bimini lending different colors to the flames.  There might not be a plot to it, but it strikes one as accurate, and worth its observational space.  In another place (A Moveable Feast) he writes of going to the Paris apartment he used exclusively to write, how at a loss he'd eat oranges and through the peels in the fire and watch the colors.  I think random thoughts, I feel the flow of breath and atoms within me, and then I gather the strength to start the day's tasks.

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