I wrote this on December 10th, 2005, at 3:33pm in Vail, Colorado, right after finishing a book by Alice Sebold called "The Lovely Bones;" its aftershocks are potent, and it is a book I highly recommend.
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It shakes me heavily how someone can compose something so poignantly beautiful out of a story so horrifically tragic.
Life does not exist in separate blocks of happy and then sad, but these emotions are constantly juxtaposed, eternally vying for attention. My thoughts are forever torn between memories that stab like icicles and thoughts that make something inside me literally bubble with emotion, as if I may at any moment break into song or laughter or crying or some unknown, frightening combination.
Today, as life is starting (my sister is having a baby today -- right now, actually), so also life is disintegrating as I, we, all grow older, some pieces of us fading to black and some lighting up with color in previously unexplored places.
And time; time is not our enemy but our healer -- a disturbing, patient ghost that forever ties us together with infinite strands we call moments.
If we could only find a way to marry our atoms to the moment we're living, I think we would find our life's music in tune.
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"To believe in God is to believe in the salvation of the world."
"The paradox of our time is that those who believe in God do not believe in the salvation of the world, and those who believe in the future of the world do not believe in God."
"Christians believe in 'the end of the world;' they expect the final catastrophe, the punishment of others."
"Atheists in their turn... refuse to believe in God because Christians believe in him and take no interest in the world..."
"Which is the more culpable ignorance?"
"...I often say to myself that, in our religion, God must feel very much alone: for is there anyone besides God who believes in the salvation of the world? God seeks among us sons and daughters who resemble him enough, who love the world enough so that he could send them into the world to save it."
-- Louis Evely, In the Christian Spirit (Image, 1975)
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It amazes me that someone can run a thread of purpose through our miniscule, pain-filled lives, but I do believe it.
If I didn't believe there was something out there I don't understand that is able to do this utterly impossible something -- namely: create purpose out of the constant mess of life -- well, from my perspective, I'm just not sure what there would be to live for.
For some reason, I still have hope -- and sometimes that's all I have.
But most of the time, it's enough.
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Perhaps the most evil thing about humanity isn't our propensity for malevolence but our ability to get distracted.
The other day I toured Henry Ford's replica of Edison's laboratory inside Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. I was mentally transported to Menlo Park, New Jersey, where Thomas Edison and his team created history in the form of invention after invention and gave me the artificial light by which I write this.
At the Village, I discovered that Edison and I could be friends. Near the historic buildings they have character actors playing the parts of these fantastic people, and Edison seemed like the kind of guy I could get along with (assuming he was even close to still being alive, of course). He was apparently intense and passionate and never, ever gave up. And... he was just a little crazy.
Yeah, we could definitely be friends.
So, during all this, I wondered where the light bulb of today is; I mean, the light bulb was completely revolutionary, has impacted the entire planet, and honestly hasn't changed all that much in the past 125 years. Where are these new ideas? Of course, we can put computers and the internet in this category, but cars and airplanes -- they were invented back in Edison's day, too.
In any case, my point with the whole "distraction" comment above is just that I wonder: if people wouldn't get so easily distracted by the pursuit of dollar signs, if the greatest minds on the planet could be harnessed to better humanity instead of dis-integrate it, if we could somehow look past ourselves and think about somebody else once in awhile...
What in the WORLD might we accomplish!?
I think we, as humans, find a lot of ways to distract ourselves. This idea probably doesn't sound too ridiculous if you stop and think for a moment. I think about what things really make me smile and then realize I spend most of my day NOT doing those things, and I realize that humanity -- particularly western "developed" humanity -- has created an entire ecosystem of material distraction.
It makes me sad, because what comprises the entirety of one's life can be almost nothing but a series of distractions from what's truly important to that person. Now, I hope and pray that at the end of our lives, this situation will describe neither you nor me, but I know a lot of people that already live in this place.
The thing about distraction, though, is that we always have a choice in the matter. By definition, a distraction is something that takes our focus away from something else. So I suppose the trick is to learn to recognize those things that uneccesarily grab our attention, and to not let them control us.
Easier said than done, I know. But it's a start.
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UPDATE: Apparently Edison might have also been kind of a bastard...!? Love the quirky eccentricity, but... yeah, not gonna be friends with that.
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