Maybe everything’s not arbitrary. Maybe everything happens for a reason. Not the way people say that though. Not some good, holy, pre-ordained sort of reason. Just, maybe, everything’s not arbitrary. Maybe it all happens the way it always had to happen. Like dominoes falling. Not good, not bad, just happening, one after another.

Dominoes I can understand. I can see how they will fall and how they have fallen. My mind wraps around them easily. But this existence I’m in. I don’t understand any of it. Not very well anyway. But I’m human. So I feel like more than just another domino – even though I doubt I am.

Maybe there is no such thing as luck. But I can’t see the dominoes falling, so I call it luck because I can’t understand it; can’t change it. Good luck. Bad luck. Is that all it ever boils down to? People say “I did this” or “I did that” like they made it happen. But maybe we’re just dominoes. Nobody ever earned anything. Your parents were poor, or wealthy; or you were talented or a dud; or had good luck, or bad; but you didn’t make you who you are – doing the things you do. You and I are just happening.

It’s strange. I can believe this to be true, and I still feel like I’m not just a domino. I feel like I’m making choices.

Why do I demean the domino? What’s wrong with events unfolding with infinite predictability? Why do I desire my perception of free will to be true? Maybe I’m afraid that my suffering has been arbitrary and my accomplishments hollow. What good is a win that could never have been a loss?

At any rate, all of this mental gymnastics is really for nothing. Either I have free will or I don’t, and I hold the unshakable perception that I do have free will. It’s uncomfortable when my sense of reason and my sense of reality don’t match up.

Beautiful things only grow out of shit.

Pleasure filled security is a desert for art.

Suffering is the field where brilliance springs toward the light.

How do I reconcile this observation with my morality?

I crave peace and prosperity for me and mine along with you and yours, but a world without pain is a plain and untextured place. As the world loses its struggle, it loses its meaning. Can we fill our lives with more humane struggles, so that we don’t lose our souls as we give ourselves meaning? Perhaps that is the pinnacle of civilization.

I want the light, but it feels meaningless without the dark.

Suffering is breaking my heart.

But what is more insufferable than an artless world?

The profundity

of a gun, you see,

is that it lives
to take a life

Compromise is the price we all pay for being social creatures. Restriction of liberty is the price we pay for being civilized. How civilized do we care to be? It’s too late to back away from being social.

These echos of new ideas. I wander through the woods of my mind hunting them. I know if I do not spring my trap when they appear and show me opportunity, they will slip away. Sometimes I spot them again in the woods, but not always.

Praise people for any good deed they do. In a world starved for appreciation, kind words are the best currency.

My family and my country are tied together. Both striving grossly toward something better than what we have been. We hope. Our deeds have fallen short of our ideals, but generation to generation we move forward. Mostly. If we manage not to annihilate ourselves, we may become something worthy of admiration. But we have a long way to go, and we are still a great danger to ourselves. Mostly we are trying our best though. Each of us in our own way as a part of this slowly reconciling family.

I am wealthy when my needs are met and I am sated.

What are my needs?

When am I full?

When am I poor, and when am I greedy?

What of poverty of spirit against material poverty?

How do I weigh my needs and satisfaction against what I feel for my brothers and sisters?

How do I feel about my brothers and sisters?

Who is my brother and who my sister? All? Some? None?

How much for me and how much for we?

I have very little when I strike out alone… Maybe even when I have much.

What luxury to enjoy the space to ask such questions!

Ah, she’ll be around. We doesn’t end. Only I ends.