95%......

     What do you do all day?  What do you do when you go to the mountain?  What did you do today?  On occasion, I think of my life as being in the fourth quarter.  A wave a sadness come over me for a few minutes and then I think if I live the rest of my life in a mindful and awake manner, I will have more life ahead than the 95% bullshit I have squandered my time on.   Who cares about most things that were once so important?   Oh, I will still play a video game because I am too tired to do much else and I have never been a good napper.   Oh, I will still say stupid things because I haven’t developed some special sensing device that would make everything nice.  My Mother was nice.  She hated that people saw her as nice, but she was nice.  If you said, I like brown sugar on my ice cream she would say, that’s nice dear.  She was nice.  I might say, I can see your hormone imbalance tilting with the sugar overload.   My mother would say, be nice.  I would say, why?  But who am I being nice to or about? 

     I stepped into the shit this year by telling someone something about themselves that they apparently do not know about themselves.  Everyone else knows but he didn’t know or denies or hopes no one notices.   I would hope any good friend would say…. You have spinach in your tooth.  Probably not nice.  Better to let you get home and look at your reflection and say, shit, I have spinach in my tooth.   If I had to do it over again.  I would say nothing.  Not to be nice, but I caused myself anguish and if I am not kind, aka nice, to me, who will be.

     I am beginning to be more observant of the walking wounded that are marching about me.  Swollen ankles, bent legs, non-smiling faces stuck on the fact that life was not as kind as they think it should be.  People are walking about pulling steamer trunks of pity me crap.  The young folks wear clothing that are falling off of one shoulder or has material hanging a foot longer on one side.  What is that about?   I hear less laughter from most, more finger clicking about some vital conversation about the 95% bullshit stuff to people they will not know in a year but is oh so important today.  

So what if you eat the desert first!   Or you never eat desert?  I am going to change my motto from it is all good to let it be.  Sounds like a song.    I am thinking of my family or families.  I had two families, father’-  austere Germans and mother’s smiling but dishonest Irish.  Neither talked about anything that mattered much.  Father’s clan didn’t joke or laugh much but were scholarly and severe even when relaxing.  Mother’s jokes a lot, read but ever discussed the book.  Both ate or many be over ate.  Mom and Dad never parted angrily and called each other dear or sweetheart. They were a good couple and appeared to have made it work for them.   The rest of the family hardly hugged.

     When I was up on the mountain, I thought about physical contact.  I could not remember the last time someone hugged me.  I probably give an impression that I am not a hugger but not true.   I am thinking of a website that you might connect with that would just say… do you need a hug…   Mmmm.  Well, do you?   I would hug you even if you were a micromanager because we all need that little human contact so we remember we are not just a doing machine.

I am off to listen to classical music and let my soul be hugged.