Seeing The Matrix

Matrix code

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”                                                                                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                – Morpheus

 

Stick around long enough, and the code starts to bleed through the mirage. Look closely, you can see the making behind the look in peoples eyes as you pass them on the street; visualize the stories that lead them to this moment. Repeatable, definable and relatively predictable. The programing that fuels reactions in the faces that fill our days courses just beneath the surface, whispering through the veneer of humanity.  

Fear, envy, loathing, or joy, kindness, and warmth begin to reveal their making in the lines of code that run at the core of us all. The same elaborate programming can make some wealthy while leaving others destitute. It forms skyscrapers and homeless camps alike. Inherently this Matrix is neither evil nor righteous, it simply is.  It has no nature but that which we give it. It can be altered but only when we ourselves accept its presence. I did not see it until recently, now glimmers and threads appear everywhere I look. 

The Matrix is all around us, even now. Can you see it?

Bucket List

Bucket List image

My sixteen-year-old son and I were discussing bucket lists the other day.  He told me he had only one item on his, which was to attend my funeral.

“Why is that?” I asked.

He looked at me for a moment, “Because I don’t want you to have to attend mine.”

#heartbreakinglythoughtful

#love

In The Blink Of An Eye

Jackson Hussey 6th grade Trampoline

Now you see me, now you don’t.  

Yesterday I walked into my first day of kindergarten. I blinked and had a bachelors degree. A few days later I held my ten-minute old baby boy, I blinked and he’s gone to college. We all feel it, the Einsteinian vortex that turns days into years, then decades into nanoseconds. All in the blink of an eye.

I am aware of the fact that I overuse the word ‘bittersweet,’ but I’ve not as yet found a more suitable way to describe this beautiful, sorrowful adventure. ‘Love’ is another word that some feel falls in the category of overused. I personally love the concept of the bittersweetness of life, so there.

In the presence of things we love we don’t want to blink. We don’t want to miss a moment. Then eyes shut tight when boredom, discord, or darkness flood our tiny worlds. So then it is the case that we choose to be open, to be present, or to blink, to escape. Hungry eyes open wide for the moments we cherish or crave, then clench to deflect pain or fear or push tears as they wash over us. Human nature, yes.

It’s easy to watch our loves grow up, not so to watch them grow weary and wither. Blink, and you’ll miss it, but what is it? The person you could have spent a mostly happy life with? Your children’s childhood or perhaps your own? The chance to create something beautiful that instead will never be? Adulthood takes on the quality of endlessness for a time, the perfect breeding ground for the cunning cancer of complacency. 

We cannot stop the ‘illusion of time,’ but we can choose to challenge its passage with vigilance. When the days grow short, and memory becomes our most precious holding; when we painstakingly replay the moments of our lives, will we rejoice in, or regret the choices we’ve made? How much will we have truly seen, known, or touched? How much will we have lost to the blink of an eye?

In My Time of Dying

In my time of dying

In My Time of Dying – Thank you, Led Zeppelin, for the opening line : )~

As to the next line of the aforementioned song, I won’t go so far as to discourage mourners, for that will no longer be an issue within my sphere of influence.

I will say though that I would prefer a celebration! Just sayin’.

Claiming a life well lived would be mine to conclude on the way out, and a point with which others could agree or debate, but again when the time comes such agreements or disagreements will be of small importance, at least to me.

What I do know is that for those I’ve loved, I will not be gone. A singing cardinal on the maple branch at dawn, a sudden thundershower, a new favorite song, I’ve loved those things in this life, and so they will always be a part of me, and I a part of them in the lives of those who carry on.

In my time of dying, I wish peace, tranquility, and acceptance for any who might grieve.  Most importantly, I want them to know they have been loved with all the commitment and earnest appreciation that a human being could have mustered in one small lifetime.

In my time of dying please play the following song, for those I’ve loved, those I did not have the pleasure of coming to know, and for me, if only in the form of memory.

 

P.S. My health is currently delightfully good. I was just having a dust in the wind moment and thought I’d get it all down while it was fresh.  

Elves and Dwarfs

ZwergElb

My youngest is going camping with his friends this weekend. We’ve amassed quite the collection of camping gear over the years, so of course, we spent Thursday evening setting up numerous tents in the living room to determine which one would be best suited for the adventure. Sounds of nylon against carbon fiber filled the room as tent poles slid through support loops and various forms of portable housing took shape.

Somehow Game of Thrones came up. Amidst the racket, I heard my eldest ask,

“Is Peter Dinklage an elf?”

“No,” I responded, “he’s a dwarf. There are no such things as elves.”

My son gave me that look; you know the one teenagers give you when they realize you’re going deaf, or crazy, or whatever.

“No Dad, was Peter Dinklage ‘in’ Elf ?  You know, the movie?”

Laughter joined the sound of rustling nylon, filling the room.

It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn

rain storm web1

It’s always darkest before the dawn, but what if dawn never breaks? 

Optimism vs. fortitude.  One is outcome dependent, the other self-sustaining. Dark times come, and hopefully, go, but “hope” is not a strategy. The only meaningful goal then is to endure, rather than to dream of being rescued.

As the midnight storm clouds bare their icy fangs I brace for the knife blade deluge of unexpected misfortune this season demands.

Bad Santa

Current front-runner for ‘line of the week’ at my house:

“Never watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with my dad. He pauses the video every five minutes to point out when Santa is being a dismissive, disrespectful, self-serving ass, and that such behavior is totally unacceptable!”

My 19-year-old son imparting a little our-house-specific holiday wisdom to his girlfriend.

#teachablemoment

 

The More Things Same, the More They Stay the Change

The more things same web

Time is an illusion, or so say theoretical physicists, some Buddhists, and a few uncredentialed randos. Change, on the other hand, is palpable. On the cosmic continuum, our human lives are laughably short, unless of course one throws caring for a newborn baby into the mix at which point each moment takes on the guise of eternity.  

What to do with such a minuscule timeframe?  Establish an identity?  Wear it as a mantle, or suit of armor?  Perhaps.  On a more interesting tack, might we open our minds to the so-called illusion of time and embrace the challenge of change? 

That sound we hear at night when we cannot fall asleep, that jarring metaphorical thunder strike that suddenly and unexpectedly transgresses our imagined force field of normalcy, that ominous silence which becomes deafening during unwanted moments of solitude; that is the sound of inevitability.  It is the specter or the hope of change. It knocks at the door when we do not expect a visitor, or claws at the window on a stormy night as we toss and turn, tangled in our sweat-soaked sheets.  It is the ‘inescapable,’ taunting the prisoner.

Some folks make peace with change, even crave it. Others purposefully oppose it in archetypal ‘arch-rival’ fashion. One path leads to some manner of peace with what is going to be, the other leads to voluntary disappointment. Each is a fine perspective, though one opens new doors while the other bars them. Either way, the drama is short lived.

A dam with no floodgate cannot contain a relentless downpour forever.  So it is with the ‘illusory’ incubus we call ‘time.’  The waters will crest, the dam will fail, the future will wrench historical normalcy from the hands of every true believer and cleanse the land with the as yet unknown.  

Holding tight to the past, or even the present will give the illusion of effectiveness for a decade or two. ‘The more things same, the more they stay the change,’ but only for so long.  Nostalgia is bittersweet as is the inevitability of change, but only one of them is optional. Onward!

Namaste