What A Fool I Used To Be

I'll come out and admit that I'm a dreamer Ive always spent too much time in my head, imagining the possibilities of life and wishing to be living in a different way than I am currently. Even though that adjective alone puts me in the same bucket as Kermit the Frog, in some ways being a dreamer can be a painful experience. Dreaming for some idea or situation to come into reality would certainly fit the Buddhist definition of a craving, specifically for something to be different than it is, and as I touched upon last time this can in fact be a cause of suffering and judgement (often self judgement in this case). There's a lot of ideas I have which do not get written or even drafted (which sort of makes it even weirder that any of this stuff does get written or even looked over a second time before releasing) and one which is sitting in my blog right now is called "Mr Wanted to Be." It was sort of an idea for a short story and its mere presence shows the danger of ...

English, as a language and especially the way we speak it in America, has a lot of words and phrases with somewhat complicated or weird meanings. Take a word as beloved as well, love. People can use it to describe how they feel about music, jobs, other people, etc. There are of lot of such examples, but one that strikes my mind often is the concept of being Normal.  Normal is a pretty normal word to say. People talk about it a lot, often to ask if something they do is normal. Is watching Netflix for 20 hours Normal, is it Normal to check Twitter first thing in the morning, is it Normal to listen to the same song 100 times in a row, the list goes on. Its always seemed to be me that Normal, despite trying to represent a lack of deviation from the natural flow of the universe, is particularly strange for two mains reasons. For one thing, its often a term of judgement, and for another people talk and think about it like some kind of ubiquitous standard but really it is an intensely ind...

The human experience is unique because its different for each person. Everyone is born in a slightly different time and place and each of the many factors of our upbringing can have lasting and meaningful impact on our life. Despite this, there are a lot of commonalities to the human experience as whole. I'm fond of a lyric by Jack Johnson which sings that  "humans are animals with just fancy shoes, ... [and] tools to build all the junk that we sell" While I think there is some poetic truth for this, I personally love animal lives and cherish them just as much as human ones, the skeptic in me is quick to point out that thats not entirely true. Sure a lot of our tools and time since the industrial age began have been focused on competitive practices which reward the sale of intoxicating junk, but thats not the whole story. A lot of time has also been spent sharing and spreading ideas, and for me personally thats the best part of being human. And I think at the root of this...

 In the tradition of life on earth, no one exists without sacrifice. Animals, for all the beauty truth and purity that the help bring into the world, certainly live very challenging lives. Each waking moment is a search, a quest for the next essential item. Everything in the world around them is either a resource or a competitor. Earth itself is only so large as what they can interact with and what visibly impacts them. Despite all our attempts to separate ourselves from the animal world, with clothes cars and capitalism all presenting a stark contrast to the utilitarian harmony of nature, human beings for the most part still live under these same conditions. There may be more abstractions and middle men between ourselves and our basic needs, but really most adults wake up in the morning and go to work not because they feel any sort of purpose in the work they do or the people they interact with, but because it pays money; and money is the catalyst for all the cheap convenient crap...

I was driving to work with my boss and he made a comment to me that sort of stuck with me. He told me that I "talked about death too much." It was said in response to a pretty harmless and offhand comment, I believe I iterated that someone who was driving recklessly in traffic was liable to kill someone, but it did get me thinking about death, and how death has related to my life. I'm not sure what the regular amount of death to experience in a young person's life is but I would venture to say I feel like Ive seen a little too much. I didnt grow up in a warzone, urban or otherwise, but I did watch my dad lose both of his parents at a relatively young age for an adult (he's the youngest of 8) and I also buried a friend of my own when I was 18. All of these deaths were very sudden, especially my own friend, so even though I dont think the amount of death I saw made me paranoid or afraid of my own death to an unreasonable degree, it did make me very aware of just how...