Just a little more than usual
There are many places in this country that we haven’t visited yet– The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Teddy Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota; Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, Sand Dunes and Rocky Mountain National Parks, along with less well known spots all over this land.
I’d like to travel to Japan and visit for a while, also Australia and New Zealand; maybe pay a visit to relatives in Sweden and venture into the other Scandinavian countries. And Iceland.
I guess that’s more than 10.
Every time this topic appears, I choose something different. So this time around, I’ll use one from Bertrand Russell, since it seems a propos of the times in which we live:
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd.
Get your own house in order, and all that. Take yourself seriously enough, but not so much that you see no one else.
And remember– Donald Trump is no one’s role model. He is indeed one of a kind, and that’s one too many.
Maybe a cross between Charlie Brown and George Bailey. Charlie is loyal and a bit wishy-washy, though at times can be quite determined; George is haunted by unfulfilled dreams and worried that his presence in the world has made little difference to anyone.
Beyond cause and effect, besides action and consequence, I have trouble believing that everything happens for a reason. That’s a pretty wide-ranging, convenient generalization.
If someone is always looking for a rational explanation, or a silver lining, I believe they may be grasping at straws, searching for something that isn’t there. Not everything in life can be made sense of, or wrapped up with a nice bow, or is possessed of some intrinsic meaning.
When a young child dies of cancer, or a couple succumbs in an accident on their wedding day, or war breaks out and people die needlessly at the hands of some cold-hearted politician on a power trip, there are few things less comforting than someone offering that God has another angel in heaven, or that some terrible occurrence is God’s will. If I hear someone say such things, I want to grab them by the collar and shake them awake.
Of course, I don’t do that. I instead grimace like I just heard someone scratch their fingernails on a chalkboard, then find somewhere else to be.
We go to great lengths to put a square peg in a round hole, to sooth ourselves, find that balm in Gilead, and tell ourselves that all is well when it’s not.
We grieve, we make peace, we lean on each other. We walk with a limp, learn to live with the loose ends and the mystery.
I don’t have a style, really. Just clean and uncluttered, functional furniture, some artwork and family photos on the walls.
The ones I’ve read have all ended the way they were supposed to, even The Old Man and the Sea.
Sometimes I wish the Bible came with an addendum filled with corroborations and more recent eyewitness testimony, maybe even a stamp of authenticity from a trusted expert. I guess that wouldn’t change much, though.
To manage to remain healthy and live at home with my wife for at least another ten years, long enough to see at least one of our grandchildren graduate high school.
A reasonably close second would be to come into enough money to live comfortably, travel a bit, and be able to buy a hybrid vehicle that’s comfortable to drive and get in and out of.
Of course, the longer I go without publishing this, more possibilities come to mind, like living in peace, living Trump-free, leaving these dark and confusing times behind, and undertaking a wholesale effort to reverse human-induced climate change.
It might be a tie between Indiana Jones and Chuck Noland (Cast Away). The stories they could tell, the wisdom they could impart…
The first thing that came to mind was a pair of comfortable shoes or a tool or something, but I needed to give this a bit more thought.
The cars we drive are both 12 years old and have served us well, but I feel like there must be something else.
I suppose in the bigger picture, it was a college education, toward which I paid a relatively meager sum but which led to being able to get a seminary education, which in turn provided us with the modest means to purchase a little patch of earth with a house on it and eventually retire with enough monthly income to get by and remain involved in the lives of our children and their children, who live close by and far away.
