Adding and Subtracting and Toting Up the Meaning
Usually, I sit down to write these blog posts and a theme comes to me. It's not usually an effort. I just think about the goings-on and notice a peculiar pattern. Or an odd outlier. I try to find some meaning in life, which might seem unbelievably quaint but usually I give it a solid college try.
So far, 2018 has been a neurotic cat totally unwilling to get herded. Maybe Mercury is in retrograde or something. When I try to recall yesterday or last week or last month, it's all choppy and poorly lit.
Probably normal people don't attempt to summarize their calendars. But when I don't or can't, it makes me harshly aware of the nature of earthly things -- mainly that anything I can touch with my fingers, hear or see is as mesmerizing as it is vacuous. Everything tangible I'm preoccupied with at this exact moment, I know I won't remember in a month. And time disappears without even a poof.
Despite all my faults, which are numerous and occasionally spectacular, I think I figured at least one thing out. What matters to me is what the time spent adds up to. And if it actually adds up to anything, it is possible to write down the sum of it on a piece of paper.
Therefore.
I have a proxy for determining if there's any sort of meaning to be found in how I'm choosing to fritter away my hours. It's my ability to write a blog post or a really short journal entry. Nice when it's that simple.
Quite possibly this whole introspective phase might have started right after my second, and final, grandmother died in January. It's been a tough transition. Anyone who has experienced the death or disablement or departure of beloved family or a friend has experienced the same, I'm confident.
What a melancholy moment it is to find yourself in the possession of a topic -- a topic that, in the past, you would have tucked carefully away in brain tissue. While you waited, with great anticipation, for the chance to talk to the one other person who would also relish the topic.
And then together you'd inspect the topic and poke at it, savor it. You'd laugh over it using language no one else would understand because the words are really about the thing that happened twenty years ago and you both smile as you remember it.
But now, instead, you spot the topic. Maybe you turn it over in your hands once or twice. And then you drop it on the sidewalk because. What's the point.
That's an endgame right there. To be around and appreciate people who see time spent together as an opportunity to build something together. A structure where all these shared topics hang on the walls in frames and the chairs are comfortable. This mysigt-filled place might have a name in Swedish. Probably the Buddhists also have it figured out.
Even though I can't think of a good name for it, let me state for the record that without this joint construction project, the relationship or friendship isn't much more in hindsight than laundry lists of dates on the calendar.
I don't know.
I guess it's fun while it lasts.
So far, 2018 has been a neurotic cat totally unwilling to get herded. Maybe Mercury is in retrograde or something. When I try to recall yesterday or last week or last month, it's all choppy and poorly lit.
Probably normal people don't attempt to summarize their calendars. But when I don't or can't, it makes me harshly aware of the nature of earthly things -- mainly that anything I can touch with my fingers, hear or see is as mesmerizing as it is vacuous. Everything tangible I'm preoccupied with at this exact moment, I know I won't remember in a month. And time disappears without even a poof.
Despite all my faults, which are numerous and occasionally spectacular, I think I figured at least one thing out. What matters to me is what the time spent adds up to. And if it actually adds up to anything, it is possible to write down the sum of it on a piece of paper.
Therefore.
I have a proxy for determining if there's any sort of meaning to be found in how I'm choosing to fritter away my hours. It's my ability to write a blog post or a really short journal entry. Nice when it's that simple.
Quite possibly this whole introspective phase might have started right after my second, and final, grandmother died in January. It's been a tough transition. Anyone who has experienced the death or disablement or departure of beloved family or a friend has experienced the same, I'm confident.
What a melancholy moment it is to find yourself in the possession of a topic -- a topic that, in the past, you would have tucked carefully away in brain tissue. While you waited, with great anticipation, for the chance to talk to the one other person who would also relish the topic.
And then together you'd inspect the topic and poke at it, savor it. You'd laugh over it using language no one else would understand because the words are really about the thing that happened twenty years ago and you both smile as you remember it.
But now, instead, you spot the topic. Maybe you turn it over in your hands once or twice. And then you drop it on the sidewalk because. What's the point.
That's an endgame right there. To be around and appreciate people who see time spent together as an opportunity to build something together. A structure where all these shared topics hang on the walls in frames and the chairs are comfortable. This mysigt-filled place might have a name in Swedish. Probably the Buddhists also have it figured out.
Even though I can't think of a good name for it, let me state for the record that without this joint construction project, the relationship or friendship isn't much more in hindsight than laundry lists of dates on the calendar.
I don't know.
I guess it's fun while it lasts.
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