Thursday, February 17, 2011

Change

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
Change.

Think about that word for a brief minute. Really let it sink in. Let it slosh around inside you and coat your insides. Feel the many connotations of the meaning of the word. It is like milk of magnesia of life.

Change.

 Dictionaries define change in many ways. It can be a noun or a verb or an idiom. A cashier can hand it to you in smaller bills or coins then you gave them, along with your purchase. “The change changed hands.”

It seems to me that change is also the entirety of our being. I am rapidly and constantly in some state of change. The world that I look out at is in continual flux. Some changes I seem to battle with, some I don’t notice too much, some display themselves with shockingly regularity. Personal change seems like the weather to me. One day it is raining, the next snowing, and the next the sun shines down upon me. It could be car troubles, work troubles or troubles with people in your life that are breaking up the harmonic progression of your traveling path. It could not be problems at all...a new friend, a happy place or more focused vision.

The act of encountering the roadblocks, speed bumps and potholes of change, (notice the analogies of the road, don’t know why they all were road related but they are) add a large part to the variety of life’s journey. Or maybe for this paragraph it should be life’s car trip.

But for all the confusion that change can bring I try to think in bullet points about what it truly represents.
It may well be a metamorphosis. Simple (or complex if you think about it) as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, work clothes cast off at the end of the day for sweatpants or an adjustment of your held opinions.
  • Growth or decay (we wouldn’t have mushrooms without both working in harmony)
  • New experiences to break up the monotony of life
  • Opportunities to smile about things (or is not a smile a witnessed change to a persons face?
  • Look at every moment like a new painting of the future.
  • (Add your own additional bullet points here)
Change takes composure and patience to have the most impact with us. Both of which, I continually need more of. Change is not my ruler but I realize that it is the rule of this life.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Bones A Rattlin' for a Fight


I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life,
As a disbeliever in reality,
A countryman made of all the bones in the world?--Wallace Stevens
I was told by a close friend that I think too much. That I look too deep into things trying to find meaning. He told me that it is OK to not think so much.

I know this to be true. I wish my mind would allow me to listen to him.

I seem to only work at two levels in my life, one that is totally engulfed in whatever the body is doing or it is dashing off somewhere in contemplation of where the universe came from. Hard as that is to explain, it is a black and white reality to my thought process. It's an on/off switch.

The main trouble is I am finding it harder and harder to satisfy the thirst that continues driving me to understand and to seek substance about things. And the more I seek them out the more new things pop up that need to be understood. My list of books keep growing, poets need to be explored, classics read, old books reread, music listened too and collected. And the half-finished projects surrounding me that I work on regularly sporadically (Try to make sense of that sentence).

Yet at the very same time my soul screams that "You are not going to live forever for cryin' out loud and try to relax and enjoy and live without trying to figure out every gosh darn thing around you." Stopping the effort of putting all the flesh on the skeleton of my life and wonderings at the same time as it is parting from my bones is a losing battle.

I am going down with a fight.