Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Flash Forward

I've always been one of those people that's had trouble living in the moment. I guess that's something everyone struggles with, but for someone whose life has been as rich in experiences and people as mine has been, I've found those moments surprisingly hard to hold on to and call back to mind, because I'm not sure I ever was fully inside them when they were happening.

While I was in the desert over the weekend, turning these thoughts over in my head before sleep, I had one of those flashes that changes the way you look at everything.

Everything around you, everyone you are with, everything that you are doing right now, one day will be gone, and you will wish you could be in this moment right now again.

Something about that idea shifted my whole environment into focus. We spend our lives thinking of contingencies that will protect us from loss, recoiling from love through fear, or perhaps embracing the wrong kind of love in a desperate play for security.

But it's futile. Everything in your life now will one day be gone. Either that, or you will. And at some point, on this side of the grave or the other, you will miss something about the place and time and people around you, right now.

Something about that thought put me, perhaps for the first time, squarely in the here and now. It made my hugs a little longer and tighter, and my breaths a little deeper. And sleep came easier.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

National Unity Party

Watching the disheartening reaction to the events in Arizona, most of it sadly predictable except for the lengths people (some in particular) will go to to avoid introspection about the overall mental state of the U.S., and how just maybe we should stop subtly encouraging the lizard parts of our brain in our discourse, irrespective of party, I had a thought.

If we really, really want to get this country together, all we need to do is form a party whose platform is "everything is somebody else's fault. At no point can my own beliefs or politics be challenged or called into question. At no point should I be required to weigh two opposing ideas fairly and rationally."

We'd be singing kumbaya in no time.

Keep being 6, America.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Arizona

It's irrelevant where you stand politically. If I could predict what happened in Arizona yesterday...and a lot of us did, some time ago...anyone could.

People busy pointing fingers, or ducking them, miss the point. Of course the dude was a loon, and of course there have always been loons. Sarah Palin did not pull the trigger. What's different in this day and age is we live in an environment where extreme rhetoric is everywhere. It used to be condemned. Now it's encouraged, it's accepted, it's what we hear everywhere around us. We can't have sane conversations anymore about differences of belief or policy. Our responsibility lies where we elevate the crazy talk over the sane. We're all culpable for going along with it....our media, first and foremost.

We have become a nation of people nursing our own grievances, talking past one another, ignoring any information we don't like, and avoiding introspection at all costs. And our media has been right there, milking it all the way to the bank, ready to cater to the worst in all of us, giving us all plenty of ammunition for our own pet belief systems. And we're all dumb enough to buy into it.

Whose fault is this event? The shooter's of course (or, if you like, whoever didn't get the guy some help or the mental heath system or whatever axe you wish to grind). But has the country become a place that gives the most radical, unreasonable and unbalanced people a bigger platform than everybody else? And will that result in more unstable people being encouraged to get their loony rocks off?

You betcha. And as we deplore the decline in our discourse, we'll all be busy blaming that on someone else...whoever isn't "us." And be mortally offended when that finger gets cast in our own direction.

This is gonna work out great, America. Keep right on being 6.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Ooh Shiny!

I don't think I'm alone (and welcome back to the blog, btw) in wanting to have a certain amount of positive social energy in my life...people that I think are really attractive, sexy, who inspire me, give me new perspectives, who I relate to, make me feel good about my place in the world, and make me feel a little less alone. I think we all want and need that.

For me, I always look for people that are a little out of the box. Nothing against people with normal 9-to-5 lives, it's just not what stimulates me.

Lately though, I've started to draw a line in my head between people that really have a degree of depth and character that underlies the surface attractiveness, and people that are just very good at being attractive. For lack of a better word, I've been calling these latter folks "shiny" people.

This is kind of an abstract concept, so let me try out a pretty obvious example. You're at a party. There's a beautiful girl there. She's put together well, smiles, and is friendly. You have a nice conversation. Maybe you exchange phone numbers and go out another time. But it becomes obvious after awhile that though the person is attractive on the surface, to misparaphrase Gertrude Stein, there's really no "there" there. There wasn't really anything in between the two of you in the way of a connection, and in the end, the person winds up being a waste of time and resources (particularly if you picked up the tab for dinner, you cheap bastard).

The thing is, I find that if you think it through -- or at least if I do -- take a step back from the physical reality in front of you and draw in the whole of the person, you can often take a good guess at who is really going to be worth pursuing a relationship (I mean that in the elastic way, including friendships and things like that) with, and who isn't. Or, if you can't, that at least it's really good to withhold yourself a little bit until you get a better sense of the person.

This has been a really great thing to figure out for me. It's always so great for me to meet people that I think are intriguing that it's easy to go overboard and ascribe things to them that aren't really there. That's not fair to me, and it's also not fair to them...it doesn't allow people to be who they are and be appreciate for that. And you also wind up overlooking people that aren't as glittery on the surface, but have a lot more to offer as friends.