Stupid Does Have a Darker Side

Some of my days begin with refrains of songs and sometimes the refrain stays the day.

The wood is old

The wood is tired

If the weather holds

We’ll make it fine.

But if the weather holds

We’ll have missed the point

That’s where I need to go. (From “The Wood Song,” Indigo Girls)

The weather cannot hold if we are to become better than we were, different, do more with the life we have rather than wishing our lives away for the perfect day, which will neither come nor stay. We can no longer miss the point, which has been our history.

We have one more chance to make good. Some version of this idea comes through my morning meditation almost daily now but none quite take me where I need to go.

I guess I could meditate for the rest of my life to feel better.

The thing about stupidity is determining whether people are just so dumb they don’t know better or they do, and they are just that evil.

If it no longer bothers me to appear in public with a tampon up my nose, I’m beyond blushing about any of my behavior.

It’s this last thought that doesn’t leave my mind too many places to go, so I jump off in this time of viruses jumping species. This is the world we created, in our own image as it were, and it’s not such a great place, yet here we are.

Our resoundingly resilient planet has pronounced, “Time out!” offering us a moment to consider another way of being, a chance to demonstrate we are better than we appear. Most of us are not evil but a lot of us are easily misguided. There is no longer time to ignore the point.

Which is not expressed in positive platitudes and memes of generality, none of which are about being alive and learning to live, which is messy and full of mistakes, painful but valuable in its daily experience. I eschew the word positive as it has become a way to spin whatever the weather is as–all will be well when it won’t.

I prefer to face the weather as it arrives, leaving the spin to those who brand life with one label or another, a constant commentary about absolutely nothing, utterly feckless (by design). Stupid really does have a darker side.

For me, mindfulness separates the wheat from the chaff, as long as I do the work, which I don’t always. I’m as susceptible to branding as the next person. Some days I want the weather to just hold so I don’t have to do my part (just for a little while) but I’m not alive not to live, not to experience. That’s the point.

During these days of distance from people, I look into the woods outside my window, so many worlds within worlds, where sometimes, too, chaos reigns. Viruses are known to all species but it is also true that some are of our own making. Maybe the world is setting itself right, whether or not we stay in it.

Time is a construct of our creation, meaningless to all of existence except to us. It isn’t that we cannot have routines in which we work and play but we will not pigeonhole the planet. The weather will not always hold. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, I suppose, but regardless, it is mine (with a nod to The Indigo Girls).

We are witnessing the fall of all we believed. We thought it would always hold. Turns out, it was unsustainable, the stuff of branding. It doesn’t mean we will not do better. It means we must.

I could meditate for the rest of my life and probably feel better but one day, the world would come knocking and I would be found wanting. Been there, done that. I’m not missing the point again.