There are few places where I feel more uncomfortable than Bed Bath & Beyond, but sometimes a guy has to do what a guy has to do; I needed two soup bowls, a dinner plate and more than one wine glass. From previous forays I know what I want, where it is located, the passageway to and from that location; plain white, open stock tableware; similarly with glasses. As I was escaping to the checkout counter I was confronted by a bin of clearance items: sitting on top was a set of twin sheets, full cotton flannel, $15; so last night I went to bed in comfort reminiscent of being a kid in an Ontario winter. There was no timely reason to get out of bed this morning, I don’t go to work until mid-afternoon; the temperature outside was below freezing, the apartment has poor insulation; I lay in bed until about ten; flannel sheets are a wonderful invention, everyone should know of and use flannel sheets; perhaps they do, it has been a while since I was familiar with someone else’s sheets.

What to do for the few hours I was awake, or sometimes awake? I have mindfulness exercises that fit well into that situation, I practiced them for a while; but then I thought about writing a post, this post, what would I write?

I saw the Sean Penn movie last night Into the Wild: Glenn at the video store told me that he found it better than he thought it would be, that was good enough recommendation; I watched it in two parts, the first was on the edge of boring and predictable, almost to the point where I would leave it unfinished, later I did watch the balance, found it haunting. The defining of a life.

It is difficult for me to be comfortable with a paradox that I know: Being in itself is meaningless—-It is necessary for each being to have meaning. That’s the thing that tugs at me, has made me uncomfortable for some time now.

When life here ends there will not be a tear shed by any Master Mechanic of the Universe; before we became aware God was irrelevant, after we are gone God will be irrelevant once more. The divine is what separates us from trout and cows, divinity is what makes us unlike any other being. What that divinity or divine is is the source of countless descriptions and arguments, and should be because it is at the boundary of our understanding. It is what art is about.

Having writ that I look at that modern predicament of an absence of meaning; the signs of the void are most clearly seen in the young: youth lasting for decades, so much attention and value are put into the shallow and the superficial, that universities are now vocational training institutes, that children are trained to be good corporate citizens. It is not anyone’s fault that this happens, it is just the way things are; there is no Great Depression to survive, no Great War in which to fight against clear enemies, no Great Recovery and re-building, etcetera. We need a foe in order to define what and who we become; right now there ain’t one.

So that is what I pondered on and off for a few hours inside my brand new flannel sheets; the daydreams of the young or the old, the observations of someone who has had his foe, has found his pattern, who learned the necessity of meeting what was preventing me from being myself, and going on from there.

Daily stuff, God, life, Making sense of it

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March 6, 2008

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