A distinction with a difference

All spiritualities are created equal. But you may discriminate among religions by the body counts they have amassed.

Happiness

Obstacles to our happiness abound. The best work of our lives is in setting aside, going around or just seeing through these impediments. The abiding condition that seals happiness into a visible but unreachable dimension outside our plane of existence is our own character.

Anger

Our anger is the sword of justice that may glint menacingly when brandished but turns to dust when we finally start thrusting it at someone.

nothing is mine

measuring your security by your pile of possessions, feeling like you will have years in proportion to your wealth...that is the moral equivalent of our coccyx or our appendix. It is a holdover from an animal's life where generations were unimagined and the future extended seconds or minutes forward from the crawling minute hand of NOW.

The creatures that live more in imagined time than now [what a curse that forebrain is!] ought to shape their priorities around the welfare of their great grand children. And that would entail teaching those children the emptiness of possessions.

Pick-up Artists of the Patriarchs

Why are these sociopathic displays only found on pick-up trucks? Don't other vehicles have back windows? There is plenty of glass on the back of a Prius, for instance.

Patriarchy has its roots in insecurity. To me it seems to be a strain in our culture that revolves around countering its inner fears by projecting menace and the ability and willingness to degrade and instill fear in others.


How safe would you feel around a dirt ball who thinks this window decal is funny? Who wants to be this guy's girlfriend? Who is desperate enough to bear that clod's child and what chance is there that child would be raised with out absorbing the lesson, as children do when steeped in bluster about bravely cavalier treatment of others, that he too should feel unsafe? Its not a joke unless everyone can laugh about it.

I can not think of an easy way out of a self propagating miasma like that. A solution matched to our sick era would be to stimulate the economy by giving these clueless souls large sums of money that can only be spent on psychotherapy. Cheaper I suppose would be to look into my own heart until I found a way to only feel how lost they are and then address them directly without any of my own fear or even reproach.

We all have a long way to go.

how to tell if yer head aint on straight

When you ponder whom your actions might offend, you are looking toward and arranging your future.
When you ponder who has offended you, you are looking toward and arranging your past.

Some do both. Many get stuck on just one of those tracks. The future is all that remains of your life. As you move forward through life, which way are you looking?

not immortality, just sustainability

One of my very favorite bits of wisdom might be called trite based on how many can recite it:

“Sing like no one's listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching, and live like its heaven on earth.”

And on how many think they can recite it.

I like Twain's original much better. I also adapt it for my own "live as if..." advice.

Since yesterday turned out not to be your last and tomorrow is just a theory that you will survive, receive today as a gift. But if you choose work that is worth carrying on and if you plan it and do it in community, then you may plan as if you will live for ever.

A dread of being trite is a hobgoblin of high school English teachers.