#identity part VI: this is it

summer comes to an end and so does the time spent hanging off ladders with brush and paint helping Picasso work on his livable canvases. what now?

there was a time when I was naively carefree. I would go about my days without any intentionality and never felt like something was amis. those days are gone. the carefree meandering through days and weeks is still there. but the mongrel gnawing at my conscience is telling me that time is not to be squandered without regret.

from an early age I rejected religion. literally. I was asked to stop coming to Sunday school in junior high. the wonderful volunteer teacher felt threatened by my incessant questioning of the rhetoric and felt afraid that I’d make doubters of the rest of the flock.

somehow I eventually learned about Buddhist philosophy. and I suppose that some of Hindu thought and Japanese Zazen have fostered similar patterns in my thought lines. I’ve concluded that a pluralistic society is what we live in and that the myth of a morally evolutionary humanity is akin to that of the American Dream – if you work hard enough you get the reward. absurd at best.

it is what it is.

as simple as this sentence is I find it brilliant every time I write it. we can quickly over complicate things as trivial as a morning coffee.

some of our determination to find consternation in the banality of life comes from a lack of living; a sense of not knowing what it means to subsist -to satisfy your primal need for food, safety and shelter.

Thoreau knew this when he wrote about Walden Pond in the 1850′s – prior to the industrial revolution and without an inkling about the population expansion and subsequent degradation of our ecosystem that would come in the next 150 years.

about our ‘things’ that we cherish and toil long hours for he had this to say:

“Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

I suppose Thoreau believed in the possibility for an evolution of mankind. and I think he meant a moral evolution, one where egalitarian values and a reverence for our environment would trump the pursuit of wealth accumulation. he was wrong.

the democritization of comunocations has made it so that we exist in a global community, with information about most corners of our world a simple search engine query away. but do we live in a global community or do we live in our own immediate community? environmentalists and humanists would argue that it is global. that we should all strive for often arbitrary goals, supported by scientific evidence, waiting to be discredited by new scientific evidence.

I aks you this – is not love, compassion and friendship still meaningful? if you say yes then the beauty is that we can find those values in our local communities. the same way that we cannot control the coming and going of ice ages, we cannot control the growth and repercussions of the human race. but we can enjoy our existence in the space and time we find ourselves. and that is as simple as making the choice to do so.

I’ve often had people tell me that I am very lucky for having something I am infinitely passionate about -surfing. I think they have misjudged. I am infinitely passionate about living. I want to feel with all my senses. I want to love with all of my energies the way my kid and my dog love me. I want to see how far my own faculties, my blood and guts and tendons, and my intellect can take me. but not for the purpose of wealth accumulation or social status, but because I am infinitely amazed by the things I can learn to do and overcome.

I am here right now.

this is it.

the future does not exist.

the past cannot be relived.

this is it.

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