Life Can Be a Dream

And I don't mean that in a good way.

I find that here we are in June, and I spent most of the year worrying about if I could financially make it this far. Guess what? I did. Hoorah.

Now I'm worried about September. This is pointless and stupid. [as an aside, one of my friends says he knows worrying works, because look at the huge number of things that never happened because he was worrying about them] [hey, I'm just saying]

Meantime, my kids are growing up, the weather is beautiful - this is the first Spring I can remember here that is actually a lot like Spring - and I'm missing most of it because I'm thinking of other stuff. Yoda inveighs against this when he first meets Luke Skywalker: "always his mind on the future. Hmph. Never his mind on where he was. Hmph. What he was doing." Wise observation from Yoda (aren't they all). This isn't a good thing to be doing. Joy cannot be captured this way.

And men are that they might have joy. That can be read two ways. The usual way is to read it as "men are allowed to be happy", but you can also read it as "the whole point of men is that they be happy". That's the way we're going to read it today. The whole point of all this is for us to be happy. There are 8 million reasons for us to be happy, too, but of course we're going to find the two reasons - illusions, mere potentialities, most of the time - that we might not be, and focus on those. Always our minds on the future, and never our mind on where we are and what we are doing. One cannot be grateful that way, and joy is impossible without gratitude.

That's the way most of us choose to waste our time. I know I do. Time can be converted, banked, laid up in store. We can take it with us. But we can't do it unless we are storing it up as it happens, really experiencing the minutes and hours we have, and extracting from them the joy and the pain and the sorrow and the laughter that is in them. We are admonished to become as little children. That's what kids do best. They are right here, all the time. You never catch a six-year-old losing the joy of the moment because Dad might not get a paycheck next month.

That would be stupid. Who can live in next month?