It's alright

I've been listening to a new song by 311 lately and today I really thought a lot about what the song was trying to say - so I thought I would post the lyrics here.  Just reading the lyrics does them no justice.  This is one of the best songs I've heard and it may replace Today by the Smashing Pumpkins as my favorite (it's good, but I don't know if it's better).  Well enough of my usual rambling - I'll let them say it.  I'm going to see if there is a way to get the song on here so you don't have to make up a tune for the words.

Stay with me.

Here with me. 

Right in this instant. 

Not in the distance. 

When your head is off in future time. 

That's the place where things get out of line. 

Taking in this moment. 

You time is so well spent. 

It's alright 

Wherever you are right now. 

I tell you it's alright 

That's where you're supposed to be now. 

Stay with me. 

Here with me. 

Right in this instant. 

Not in the distance. 

Standing at a crossroads, I was at a loss those 

Temporary moments pleasures that are stolen. 

Here in the present 

You're time is so well spent. 

It's alright 

Wherever you are right now. 

I tell you it's alright 

That's where you're supposed to be now. 

Wash your feet

I have been reading the bible lately. I've come to the 13th Chapter of John which speaks about Jesus washing his disciples feet. Pretty boring stuff - at least it was to me when I heard about it every year in school and church. Maybe a little explanation will help shed some light on this. Washing feet in the bible times was done mostly by the lowest of the lowly. It was done when entering someones home - mainly because sandals don't offer much protection from road dust, manure, etc - so they wouldn't track everything into the home and to freshen them up from all the walking.

Why am I writing this? His demonstration represents a universal truth - that everyone and everything is absolutely dependant on someone or something. As a friend put much more eloquently than I - people who are high up on the food chain many times develop superiority complex. I'll use her example of the veterinary or medicine world - which I also have a great deal of familiarity with as well. Doctors and veterinarians (not all of them) have a reputation for looking down on their help. They are lead to the illusion that they are better than others. What the point of the feet washing story is that without those people they would be unable to do their jobs. Imagine a hospital with only doctors - there would be a lot of suffering people in them. Without nurses, pharmacists, and all their various technicians, and clerical staff things would grind to a halt quickly.

The analogy works everywhere - if I couldn't buy clothes in a store, cars from a car dealer, food from the grocery store, or anything that allows me to go about my daily life I wouldn't get very far. I wouldn't even be able to get onto the Internet or type on this computer without the people who invented and made all those things.

It works even more deeply than that - we rely on plants to a frightening degree, plants rely on the soil, sunshine, water. The earth relies on gravity to hold it together, to rotate it around the sun and you can go on and on all day long. All of this makes your head spin as it goes deeper and deeper and you begin to realize how dependent on one another we really are.

This should after a while bring us around to the idea of gratitude - being grateful to one another and to nature for providing all it does for us. Without the person or thing that helps us do what we do, we are nothing. Realizing all of this makes me more likely (SOMETIMES I forget all the above) to thank the people and things who help me and be grateful to them. When I do that it makes others feel better about themselves. Eventually the thought that I work back to is that I really serve everyone, including those who serve under me and wash my feet. For without my service to others they would be missing part of their lives.

Why does this work the way it does? Why do people do meaningless jobs for little money? Why do people do seemingly more important jobs for a lot of money? If you asked the average person, they wouldn't be able to answer with any sort of intelligent question. In light of all my ramblings however a truth arises. We are here to help each other, to learn from each other and to serve each other. When we all finally die and leave our bodies behind - what do we have left? I wish I could say these were my words, but they are someone else's, "The only thing we have when we die is what we have given away." What we do in service to others is what we are left with, not any money, a title, a fancy car, a big house or any other "thing" - only what we give to someone else.

Agree to disagree or thirty thre

I've learned a little bit in the 33 years I've been around. Some days I think I know more than others. Today I'm not really sure. I've been in a really sort of waffling sort of mood. I read something a little bit ago that sort of irked me and I was going to write this thing that just tore it apart. Something mean.

Then I thought to myself that it wouldn't be respectful to do that. Who am I to question someone else's thoughts?

Why does life make such perfect sense one minute and then the next none at all. All I've ever been able to come up with are others words, which I can only sum up. Life is exactly the way it is supposed to be right at this moment. Life is good because of the good choices I made, it is also bad because of the not so good choices I made.

After thinking about the last line for a while I can arrive at the conclusion that life is what I make of it. My perception of good and bad is just that, what I THINK it is. I can look at some of the terrible consequences in my life that are a direct result of my actions and see almost equally good that has resulted from it. It is not an understatement to say that I probably would be truly miserable had I not made some truly appalling choices. How that works out is one of the things in this life that I haven't sorted out. I mainly just know that it works.

I have a good friend who I sometimes wish I could be. He is probably the most selfless person I've ever met. He has the biggest smile and the heartiest laugh and he just makes you feel better when he is around. He has made it his life's work to help others and does it with his most valuable possession - his time.

I think of often the words in the bible - Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. I've noticed that I am terrible at this and I do everything in my power most of the time to keep my big mouth shut when a little thought pops into my head. Tonight I was talking with someone at work about anorexia and whether or not it is a disease. Immediately after I finished a skinny woman walks up and asks where to find a particular laxative. I'll let you imagine the thoughts that popped into my head, but I bit my tongue after she walked away and didn't say anything.

To be fair to myself I have to share an example of when I didn't keep my mouth shut. I was speaking with a diabetic gentleman on the phone who was using a lot of insulin which was ordered on a scale that reflected his carb intake. I made the comment to him that perhaps he was eating to many carbs and I got total silence. I meant no harm by it, I was merely trying to get him to laugh. All that was bad enough, but then I kept at it with the person I was working with asking if they had seen him - was he overweight? I felt really bad about this and ended up calling back to apologize.

I guess the point that I am trying to make is that why should I judge others for who they are or what belief they have. They are just doing their best to try and get along in this world the best way that they know how. If I judge them in the above fashion - how can I be mad or hurt when a similar judgement is made of me.

What needs to be differentiated at this point is the difference of judgement for survival or judging just for the sake of judging. I need to be able to judge whether or not my life is in danger - not whether someone is an idiot or if they are leading a life I don't understand. This world has billions of people in it and each one of them has a different opinion about something, I can choose to agree or disagree with it, but I have no right to belittle them for their opinion. Personally just agreeing to disagree (or just remaining silent) is generally the best route for me. I would think 33 years would be long enough to figure this out, but I will probably need at least 33 more before I am even close.

Insanity

I've recently been back to reading Mark Twain again - the book I picked up I haven't quite figured out yet, but it is something either critiquing or endorsing Chrisitan Science. This is the religon founded by Mary Baker Eddy - it also includes the prestiguous newspaper or what ever it is now - the Christian Science Monitor. Twain describes an encounter with a healer and his initial learning of the church and goes into a discussion of insanity. How everyone in the world is insane to one degree or other. The definition he uses is when another person differs in opionion with another. He goes quite in depth and I would ruin his linguistic talent to try to paraphrase it, but he goes on to say that this is the basis for disagrement among political parties, governments, neighbors, other religions, etc. The fact that I or we as it were don't agree is because we think they are insane to some degree. I've been thinking about this all day and it's really quite facinating when you start to break down everything.

There is no right or wrong - only differences of opinion a good friend of mine wrote something similar about a concept live and let live and it fits in here as well. If you disagree with someone why is it such a big deal. Who are you to know better and what does it really matter in the end if you are right or wrong? It makes thing in this world all that much easier to laugh at because most of the time disagreements are laughable in the grand scheme of things. We argue about trivial matters in this country - there are people who starve to death - they have NOTHING to eat and our congress fought about people who couldn't afford converter boxes for their televisions. Now don't get me wrong I'm not saying that just because our country is prosperous we should have to give up that to make all the worlds problems go away. It's more about having an open mind.

Insanity by others is defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. I present to you our current economic situation. There is only one explaination for it - people who think they can continue doing the same things to save failing companies - prevent pain by letting them fail. The only way true growth can occur is to have pain - pain bad enough to want a difference. Sometimes it's better to touch the red hot stove to learn that it's really hot.

This brings me back to the Twain book - put both of these concepts together and things start to flesh out. If insanity is a difference of opinion and a part of it is repeating this over and over, each time expecting that people will change or conform just because we want them to - we begin to see why the world is the way it is. Things tend to go to extremese before there is a correction. My personal life proves it (at least to me it does). I've never been able to do things just a little, or medium, mediocore, whatever word you want to describe the middle. I am all or none - no half-ass for me. I truly thing most everyone else in the world is just like me in this respect.

Moderation is the key for me - in terms of my sanity it is critical. Carrying things to the extreme and expecting that the world will be handed to you on a silver platter is one side of my problems. The other is that I expect that nothing will happen - that my life is stuck on the same railroad to nowhere. Reality lies somewhere in the middle and is generally much better than either extreme. How I get to that point is something I'm trying to figure out, but what I'm learning is that I have a lot to learn, that putting one foot in front of the other is all I can do somedays.

Progress not perfection.