Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Reflections on a Good Beginning Gone Awry


My humble bow.

I write this with the intention of doing exactly what I set about doing however I know that this will change and chaos will ensue. A match cannot be held too long before it burns. I have somewhat of an understanding that there are often times in everyone's life, in every government's life, and, hey ho, in every corporation's life when fingertips begin to feel the pain signaling that change will eventually occur. It is nature. It is barbecue.

Such change is inexorable in the long run whether it is the change we set out to create or the change that we are compelled to endure. This sounds reasonable enough. So, we'll let that be.

If we are smart we guide our canoe down the changing current not expending too much energy as to create a running battle. We will place our paddle carefully and hold it strongly. By this manner, we can create a short path which we might intuitively know is best. Yet we cannot keep our placement overly long or we will become rudderless against the natural forces that overpower what was our previous best guess at the way things were and now aren't. That sounds less reasonable, but I tire of rewording.

Sometimes I find myself predicting what might befall others even though it is far more important to know what I might myself come across-- but that is dangerous territory for concern. It is certainly easier to see the much more likely course of failure from the unpredictable than from that which has been taken into account. It is not too difficult to predict disaster with generalities and be correct. Empires like Rome will fall, a space shuttle will explode, and a dust speck will fly into our eye.

And this does not even account for other possible alternate universes where at some point a scientist will land a tiny probe upon a comet and then wear an awkward shirt with multiple Tabasco sauce bottles upon it and still be loved.

Fascination with failure creates an environment much more likely to result in failure, yet fascination with success, also, is likely to result in failure. To become overly worrisome is to lose sight of the current in the stream-- to become overly proud, the same. Our news networks are both.

Everywhere around me are empires that will one day fall. There are rocks in the stream that go unheeded. I have found that it is easy enough to point out the possible problems but more difficult to know whether the current might somehow whisk us around that outcropping of rocks without issue. I blame this on a course that must have been cast early on.

The inevitable happens and life is no longer what I once knew it to be, or simply no longer.
When I look around at you, I see a novel by Joseph Heller. When I look at myself, I see some stoic masterpiece which lies disguised inside a paperback edition of the boy scout manual.

Really, we are one and the same... in the end.

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