This Starship We Call Home

 

Please enjoy this track from the artist Mr. Santer called "Baltic Breeze" on the YouTube channel Vibin'

 

If you're reading this, you are obviously someone who has remained close to me whether we spoke minutes ago or we haven't spoken in years. 

Thank you for your birthday wishes, they are duly noted. 

I am no longer an active poster or visitor to the Facebook community (among others), and I don't really intend to renew my interest in this particular platform. However, I want to acknowledge my love, respect and thanks to those who have stuck with me through thick and thin. I'm old enough to reflect on my past life and think about the successes and failures without irony or overthinking them and subsequently hating myself for who or where I am in life. 

Every day is a day I'm grateful to be here, no matter the challenges I or we face. Breathing and being healthy and of sound mind is nothing to take for granted, especially now. It is grievous, of course, to conceptualize it that way, but hopefully like many other things, I and we can look back in a few years and laugh, or wonder at what we were thinking under such seeming duress. That is for future me to wonder. For now, I do as my ancestors have done for many generations away from home and endure, persist, survive, overcome, strive, educate, create and succeed. 

More than any of that, though, I want to inspire positivity, creativity and growth. I don't want to be a hero. I want to be a good man. I want to be helpful and I want to be content. I have empathy for myself that I didn't have when I was younger, and that alone makes me sad.  But that sadness does not drive me into darkness, rather it inspires me to do better and be more helpful.  The greatest gift that keeps on giving is the knowledge and wisdom I have gained year after year from the world and especially from all of you, especially the you who is reading this right now.  I can’t ever ask for anything that’s more valuable than your faith in me and my faith in myself.  I wish I had known that much earlier; maybe we’d all be in a better place right now.  But again, I’m no hero and don’t wish to be.    

 

I will ask for one thing: please forgive my invisibility, my absence, my reticence, whatever you may call it.  There are places I no longer feel are necessary to go to or events to be present for, but that’s not your fault.  When we see each other again is merely the time we are supposed to meet.  

 

Lastly, for all of you reading this: I might have shared this years ago here or in persona, but I want to reiterate what I think is the meaning of life…

 

I had a dream wherein I realized I was dreaming (I’m a lucid dreamer) and decided to ask a seeming authority figure in the dream about the meaning of life.  This blew the person I asked away; I suppose it is odd to have the gumption to ask a stranger in a dream (a construct of my own mind and emotions) an existential question.  “You got me,” replied, “I guess you have to choose to do the righty thing.” 

 

When I woke up, that response resonated with me.  We don’t really know why we are here, that’s for sure.  And we certainly don’t know what we were meant to do from birth.  But we gain a larger perspective as we grow older and perhaps some of us fall in line with what we perceive to be our “calling”, the thing we were meant to do.  But in all of what we don or have done, we chose our next step like we choose which page to turn in a make-you-own-adventure book; only, there are far more possibilities regarding the outcome of those choices.  “Choose to do the right thing”… what exactly is that? Based on a broad standard or ethics or a subset of my own? As our civilization evolves and we become either more knowledgeable of the building blocks of the universe, what does right and wrong have to do with anything? I think the answer lies in what we choose to believe actually is right and wrong.  I myself believe that what effects the broader community and makes us all more content with being alive is a greater right than what singularly makes me happy.  But then our belief systems may clash, so that may not be “right” to someone else.  It’s a rabbit hole, a slippery slope from one question to another I won’t engage any further in.  All I can say is that if you think you know right from wrong, engage in the right and build on that experience.  That experience is obviously tempered by circumstances and exterior forces, and if you know me well, you know what I’m alluding to.  All I can say then is to momentarily put yourself in another person’s shoes before you act or react.  That’s far from perfect, but better than most things.  

 

And since life involves learning and feeling things, I’ll shut up and listen now.  Thank you for traveling around the Sun with me again on this starship we call home.