Into the great wide open

Okay, that's done. Last week, I mean. Good riddance. There was a lesson there, I bet. The rejection mail was educational, and losing the laptop got me in touch with Linux. Except I wasn't up to learning Linux. I know many swear by it, but I just swore. I wanted something that worked, right now, for me, my way. And so by Sunday I felt like a crybaby, and I do hate feeling and acting and talking like a crybaby.

The more I learn of the world, the more I understand how little I do know. The more I read, the more I come across things I should be reading and looking into. The more I travel the more privileged I feel and the less inclined I am to sweat the small stuff. And we do sweat the small stuff, way too much and all too often.

Your editor rejected you then your laptop died. The sun stopped shining, the temperature dropped, stupid brown hare ate all your crocuses, and the kids are at each other. Cry me a river. An ocean while you're at it. There's a term that escapes me but which explains our myopia and much of our depressed thoughts. I guess the layman's equivalent would be a lack of sense of proportion.

We don't compare ourselves, our lives or our circumstances to those less fortunate, much much less, say a single mother in Sierra Leone. We look at our neighbors, our friends, our peers, and feel disadvantaged. That is nuts. A misconception. The more time we spend wrapped up in ourselves, the smaller our frame of reference, the less content we feel. When it's all we know, we really don't know much. In that sense we are poor and in none other.

The more you venture outside yourself the more you understand your truth, your reality, is only that, yours. Almost seven billion other possibilities of seeing and interpreting and understanding the world, of living. As valid, as precious, as unique. Some find that thought depressing. I find it liberating and sobering and a comfort somehow. It doesn't have to make you feel small and meaningless. Let it make you feel ten feet tall and priceless. No better than the next man and no less deserving.

It's not my mission to educate, it's to learn. It's not my place to tell you this is how you do it, it's to ask how do you do it. Except I just did, didn't I? Oh well. This concludes today's sermon.