Friday, January 1, 2010

Buh-bye 2009, and the decade you rode in on.

Don't get me wrong (I'll get myself wrong on my own), a lot of good things happened in 2000-2009. Both for me personally and for a lot of people. Most importantly, all of us here are still alive and reasonably healthy. Far more than in any other time in human history.

But it sure seems that this decade had more than it's share of total freaking chaos. And lot of chaos-inducing crap that didn't need to happen if people were just paying attention. Yes I'm looking at you, Bush administration...and the just-over 50% of American voters who somehow re-elected you.

And what can you say about a decade that began with not even knowing who our President would be - for months?? A decade that is now bracketed on both sides with recessions bordering on depressions, a two-front war, and Britney Spears to boot?

In my own personal life, where my focus is probably more worthily spent, it's been a similarly crazy decade. Realistically, every decade of my life has been pretty crazy. But this decade, and in particular these past 6 months, have been especially ridiculous.

Reviewing the past is an infinitely-edged sword. One arbitrarily selects a number of years and examines them as if they are a cohesive unit. Rather than just a period in which a bunch of stuff happened. We still need to go through this process, in order to understand the present and then plan for the future - but we need to be aware that such a review can only be subjective. And very incomplete.

In other words, no matter what we guess about the causes, shit happens and it's done. In a real sense, the past doesn't even exist any more. Nor the future. All there is is the knife-edge of the present, expanding and contracting according to the scope of our focus. Just as all that really matters in the entire physical universe is the range we're focused on outside ourselves. We can focus on something as small as the fly on our hand, or as large as the jet plane we're flying in. Our focus can even expand to abstract concepts of impossible size such as nations, globe and species.

But no matter what bits of space and time we're focusing on, it's still just a bunch of stuff that is, and events that happen, that we move our way through and try to plan how to best come out the other side.

So, whew. With all of that in mind, I wish everyone (including me!) the best of all possible fortunes in this coming year, and coming decade, and all that moves forward after that.

Because life is beautiful and even existing is such a blessing that everything afterwards is parsley on the full and lovely plate.

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