Late November Thoughts

I’ve been finding that life tends to solve a lot of its own questions, which makes sense when you stop and think about it, since the questions come up based in life itself. What I mean by this is, there is no question that you can ask if you aren’t alive first to ask it. And, if you are alive, you are therefore experiencing life, and those experiences are part of you, and the questions, the questioner, and the circumstances related to the questions are all tied into the same essence, the same way that the colors of a rainbow and the light passing through it are the same essence. 

Often, the result is that the answers appear before the question even does. Which is quite nice to consider, when you don’t precisely know what you want to write, even though you have the feeling to write something. I’ve felt compelled to write on this again for a while now, with ideas that have been rattling around in my mind like noticeable but infrequent hoots from unseen birds in a dusk forest.

I also think this might be something to keep in mind when we look around and see that the world seems to be falling apart with wars, migrations, hurt feelings, ruined lives, and other injustices.

It seems to me though that we might be poor judges of recognizing what is good for us. We are always looking around at what is going wrong, and rarely stop and notice that the power came on today, the car started, or that you didn’t suddenly lose feeling in the entire left side of your body while trying to tame a bear, which would be a quite a bad day.

Nothing is perfect, people say, but how do people know this? To understand perfection, you have to have a reference point, and if nothing is perfect, then how can we understand what perfection is? Either we must admit to ourselves that we have no idea what we are talking about, or maybe the answer is that indeed things are perfect, that we already are perfect beings in a perfect world, and the notion of perfection must be challenged.

It seems senseless and unfair to go to a tree and complain that it can’t bear fruit when its still only a sapling. That tree is still perfect, but just at a different point in perfection.

By extension, I believe we would be well to bear in mind that the world at all levels, from the environmental one, to the personal world in an immediately lives, bodies, and minds, is constantly in flux, changing and developing, rather than holding it as a broken failure, being run into the ground, and a lost cause. It’s hard to argue that there aren’t real issues to be dealt with in terms of environment and questions of peace between cultures and their individuals, not to mention personal conflicts that arise in our own lives. And if one feels compelled to go and change something, then they should go as they feel compelled, and see if they can’t make a better version of the world or themselves. Humans and human effort are part of the motion of the planet. But keep in mind that it is life at work, and individuals cannot necessarily lay claim to the effort of the good or bad achieved. A river can carve a canyon, but the flowing motion is not any effort on the part of the river. Is this not also true in the lives of people? While people have choices, their decisions never come out of a vacuum, but instead are the results of a lifetime of exposure and conditioning, much that they had no control over themselves. I don’t say this means people have the right to act irresponsibly, but if we try to remember there is a universe of motion behind each action, we might see situations as something to be curious about and interested in, rather than something to despair or hate.

When you take time to look, you see that the point of life is not exactly to be comfortable or always happy. I’m not sure life has a point or even demands one, any more than the babbling of a brook has a point. It seems that it is content simply to be, and see what comes up, both in times of action, and in times of stillness.

Ultimately, life is still life, here to stay, no matter how we define it, no matter what form it takes, or how we try to destroy ourselves or save ourselves, or if it is recognized or not.