Without philosophy

Without the iconoclastic, skeptical systems perspective of philosophical thinking we toil willingly yet meaninglessly in a morass of directionless doing.

Reconnecting

Today I don’t want to sit on the thoughtfully placed benches. I don’t want to see the sweeping vistas presented to me.

I don’t want to meander inside the core where everything is fastidiously, worrisomely groomed.

Today I want to sit on a low crumbling wall behind a building. I want to watch insects and birds moving purposefully among a tangle of wild blackberries.

I want to walk out to the rough edges where things are messily, reassuringly real.

Alone

Alone right now,

Want to be with others,

Until I’m with them.

 

I hover in the liminal,

Indecisive,

Waiting to live.

My greatest fears

I sat down this morning and wrote the list below. I didn’t think about what I was writing, and I didn’t dwell on the responses; I just wrote what flowed into my mind and this is the list I produced. These are my fears today. I’m sure tomorrow they will be different. Tomorrow I may also not even think about my fears. (I usually don’t. Not consciously, anyway). But today I fear:

That I will be irrelevant

That my children and I won’t adventure together enough

That I will fail as a parent

That I will never again write anything worthwhile

That I will lose my hair and get ugly

That I will get stuck in my career and never take the path less travelled

Oddly, as I read through the list above, I feel a strong sense of gratefulness flow into me. (And also a mild consternation at my own vanity). I can think of many, many other (much, much more devastating) fears that are not mine. This list gives me hope, which is not an outcome I was expecting.

Interesting way to start the day.

Grit

Sometimes I write not because I want to write but because I am compelled to write. I write something every day—mostly it is inconsequential or existential. It is not joy but duty—not the desire to express thoughts but the obligation to put words down.

The writer has a sickness that may, someday, be seen as a virtue—by others if not by himself.