WRITING

Peter

Knowing the Unknowable

I used to love driving. In a lifetime I’ve wracked up well over 1,000,000 miles with a few years of commercial driving and a lot of touring. I find it relaxing and meditative. I’ve had some of my best thoughts whilst driving and for many years couldn’t wait for an excuse to get in the car and go, go, go, go anywhere.

Nowadays driving isn’t’ as much fun. One sees way too many stupid acts and reckless risks taken. But A nice drive is still the generator of new thoughts.

A few days ago we were chatting (you and me) about knowing about God and my mind returned to that topic as we headed west towards our summer place to pick up a few things I realize might be needed in our new house.

For the tiny little creatures we are we have monumental egos. We think we can understand the entire universe but we have a hard time regulating our own personal lives. As a race we have a horrible history of violence and discontent — nationally, regionally, locally, and all the way down to our most intimate personal relationships. After all, look at the mortality rate for marriage.:

The average length of a marriage in the United States varies depending on factors such as whether it is a first, second, or subsequent marriage. In 2018, the median duration of a first marriage was 21 years, while second marriages lasted around 17 years. For those married three or more times, the median duration was 13 years1. The national average marriage length is just under 20 years, but couples in Maine and West Virginia typically have the longest-lasting unions, lasting for 22.3 years2. However, the average length of a marriage prior to divorce is eight years3.

So much for till death do us part!

But considering that we have a hard time getting along with our “closest” partners in life the idea that we can ken the length and breadth of a supernatural being is the height of absurdity. And yet humans have been fascinated by whether there is something beyond this life and if so, what — or who — might be there to share it with.

I know that a great many people want to deny the existence of any “intelligent” “being” or “power” beyond what we can sense. And yet we are blind to much of the light spectrum, we are deaf to sounds beyond our small hearing range, we cannot smell as well as many of the animals we gather around us, our tastebuds aren’t sensitive enough to prevent us from killing ourselves, etc., etc.. We see ourselves as so powerful, even exploring the universe remotely — and yet we are pretty insignificant beings individually.

True, when acting together we can threaten the livability of our giant planet — but that takes the individual actions of millions of us all doing things that aren’t good for ourselves or for the planet and the speed with which we are killing ourselves is guaranteed to cause death and destruction lasting many years for many more millions still to be born.

Worship is something that makes no sense to the human animal.

wor·ship [ˈwərSHəp]. noun

  1. the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for a deity: “the worship of God” · “ancestor worship”

But I guess that’s what gives “worship” its real value. The idea that people with a limited lifespan would take some or all of it and devote it to the adoration of an entity that they can’t see, touch, taste, or hear is the ultimate extravagance. Perhaps that’s why the Christian concept of a God has the power that it has. I can’t speak for other faiths. I don’t understand them, I don’t practice them, I have no significant experience of them. But the idea that a Christian does things, accepts things, and believes things that seem by all human reasoning to have no value to their life — or the lives of others — is the ultimate luxury: a life lived for God and not for self.

A great many people think about heaven and or hell. I suspect that the fact of their thoughts is that they really like what they have here on earth and whatever their concept of anything that may or may not happen after death is pretty much akin to what they know here on earth. It’s hard to imagine what any other form of life might be like — so our idea of utopia or damnation is rooted in experience.

Occasionally humans get glimpses into other realities. Sometimes through art. Sometimes through music. There have been the thinkers who have transported others through actual words or the record of their experiences written down. But the likes of these are hard to find — and yet sometimes those beacons seem to find their way to those who are seeking and illuminate their life in a way that lights a flickering lamp to illuminate others along THEIR pathway.

It’s impossible to understand the unintelligible. We can’t know the unknowable. And yet some of us try. Most of the time the pursuit of God is done silently in private. The lifting of a thought. The tending of a broken heart. A helping hand extended. In thoughts, words, and actions we find ways to reach beyond this present life and touch something immortal, unknowable, too great for our brains to take in entirely.

And at this season we ponder a birth in a manger. A long time ago. We wonder why the promises of that event seem unfulfilled. Some of us give up on hope. Others cling fast. Around the world a sweet incense of devotion arises in a way we cannot sense to a being we know nothing of, really. Some question whether it’s all worth it. Others know that it definitely is. Because Faith IS the evidence of unseen things and the proof of what has not been witnessed.

Merry Christmas to you.

No blog tomorrow. I’ll be back on the 26th. Take care of yourself. Love your family and friends. And lift a glass of good cheer, with our without spirits — but with YOUR spirit.

Peace and love to all.

Peter

The Year Without Home

It’s DONE!

I have been uncharacteristically quiet for a long while and maybe now the situation will resolve itself. Since February of this year we have been not exactly “home” less, but rather ‘house’-less. Through a peculiar series of events we got involved in a real estate purchase that has taken 10 months to conclude.

I’m not going to bore you with all the details but what we started in February took on what felt like sketchy details when we needed to moved at the end of the then current lease which happened in April. Knowing we had a deal in place — but one which would not finalize till the end of summer or the beginning of autumn we were faced with the quandary of what to do/where to live in the meantime?

Our future home would be a two story/duplex. Half of it was being used 6 months a year by the owners — Snowbirds who spend half the year in Arizona and half in Wisconsin. The other unit — the upper — had been set up as guest accommodations for their friends and relatives and as a result had really not been lived in for 12 years. It was clean. And well cared for. But neglected.

We worked a deal whereby we would occupy the upper until the transaction closed and then we would move to the ground floor. Our lovely, caring daughter however decided to open her mouth and tell the then-present owners that Peg & I spend most of the summer out at our trailer near Wisconsin Dells. That was “sort of” part of the agreement that we felt we had to live with — moving into temporary quarters that we were expected to not spend a lot of time in until the deal closed. The old owners were buyers and sellers who had lots of “stuff” stored here and they would need time to garage sale and clear out.

In the end it turned out that they never really did any garage selling — they ended up moving all their “stuff” into the garage at a new, smaller, residence that they purchased in the interim. This too they will occupy only 1/2 of the year. And while they are nice enough people they are not folks we found easy to be around. Being “away” for as much of the summer as we could manage actually seemed like the most comfortable solution to an uncomfortable situation.

The idea in all of this is that we are now one mile away from our daughter and son-in-law. The residence is on the first floor and with a little luck should be the last place we ever live. Kind of a “final” sounding fact — and obviously dependent upon future health events. Still, the idea is noble. Our kids are looking out for us and that feels wonderful.

Still and all it didn’t change the fact that for 6 months — April till yesterday — we have been betwixt and between. Having a place to lay our heads — yes. But never having a feeling we were HOME. It’s a 1st World problem to be sure. SO MANY millions of refugees and displaced and catastrophe caused homeless have life so much worse than we — but it remains that we have had a difficult time adjusting to what we were hoping was going to be a new life.

We closed on the property at the end of September. Then came three weeks of painting and fixing and dealing with materials put into temporary storage, and all the good things that go along with the verb “to move.”

Yesterday it all came to fruition. After countless trips up and down during recent days and with the help of three able bodied younger folks we completed the move. My Apple health app says I’ve been doing between 15 and 25 flights of stairs daily, but that should be done now. I still have locks to change (we are replacing all the locks which were old enough and outdated enough that they offered zero security), and a few little things to handle but WE ARE IN!

And here I am, the first morning after the first night’s sleep in our actual NEW HOME, and what am I doing? I’m writing. It feels good. I have missed writing. I’m not sure what life will have in store from here forward but I’m in a much better frame of mind and I have a much more conducive set of surroundings. Life is good. It’s always good, but sometimes it’s a little easier to appreciate it is all.

Cheers and take care of yourselves. :-)

Peter

you write

It’s a great big world and almost anything you can name has more than one way of doing it. Diversity is the hallmark of the universe we live in. There isn’t just one plant on earth there are millions of different plants. There aren’t just one kind of stone there are myriad different geological composites. There isn’t one climate on the planet, indeed climate changes every few miles of distance and meters of height.

We accept all this diversity without a thought, but when it comes to how other people do things suddenly people want us to believe that there’s a right way and a wrong way and wrong way and YOU my friend are doing it WRONG!

So, where am I going with all this?

It’s about writing. I love this quote from Joanne Harris about motivation in writing:

In the same way there is diversity in the world we who write — whether for $$$ or for fun — do it for as many different reasons as there are people. For myself I have spoken on other occasions about the fact that for most of my life I have written as a way of processing the world around me. Almost like dreaming. In a dream we are told that our brain is sorting and filing the memories stored in our cranium and that what we perceive of a dream is but the smallest and perhaps most insignificant part of the dream process as our body functions.

What I have written about hasn’t exactly been a flowchart of my life, Rather it’s been signposts to points of interest. Not so much a way of remembering what has been important, more a way of signposting points of departure, conjunction, cessation and initiation.

But sometimes, as has been the case in recent months the flow of life has been muddied. It’s been as if my life was a gently flowing river that found itself poured into a large lake. As the water flowed it has taken a while for my brain to find the “way out” — and indeed to discover whether there WAS a way out. After all, some rivers do end. in some other body of water whether it be lake, reservoir, another river or ocean.

2022 and 2023 have been years punctuated by medical issues for the both of us. I’ll share a little more as time goes on but we’re both still mostly functional and the uncertainties about our bodies have settled down enough that we are able to think about other stuff once more.

Additionally, the thing about aging is that you come to realize that as your abilities change perhaps your situation needs to change too. We’ve been pondering the idea of what do we do if this place we call home no longer suits us? Where do we move, when, how, all those attendant questions that trail along with us as we move our bodies from one place to another. We, Peggy and I, have decided that a physical move is the right thing to do — and that is another process that we are in the middle of — right now at this moment. Boxes are starting to surround us on the floor even though it will be nearly a month before anyone comes along to drag them off to a new residence.

Back in the 2000’s when I was making money using my camera I fussed and fretted a lot about just WHAT my photographic STYLE looked like. At the time I wasn’t thinking about my writing style — I was young enough and my brain was fast enough that I just sat down and wrote. I wasn’t having to write for $$$$ so I didn’t have time pressures or editorial concerns I had the luxury — still do — of writing if and when I wanted.

I remember back then reading other blogs what were obsessed with how they said things. At the time I listened to those conversations with a sort of curiosity as it was foreign to me. I just sat down and processed. Which was my salvation — I needed to write to process what was going on; writing wasn’t an adjunct, it was part of me.

Now my brain has slowed down…. Boy has it slowed down. Enough that I’m very aware of it. Not just my reaction time — as in driving or trying to catch something falling off the kitchen counter. But in how quickly I see things; whether I can recall the names of public figures I have known about for decades; or even the periodic correct word for a situation. I have always been proud (I use that word guardedly because I do try not to let hubris rule, but to be confident that my word choice was appropriate for the situation) that I could put together an intelligible sentence. I know I don’t always follow the rules but then not following rules has pretty much been my one rule of life. I’ve always been a loner, independent and a bit stubborn.

P.D. James would have say that we develop our style by doing one simple thing: just doing it. That is so true not only of writing but also of life. Over a lifetime — I’m now working on my 76th year — we begin to appreciate diversity and the idea that we can all live our life in our own way, we can have our own style which sort of happens when we just give in and let our brain and our body do the things that they do naturally.

I had a mother who was tied to her mother’s apron strings till she died. She wanted desperately for me to be tied to hers. I know that in my late teens and early 20’s I gave her a great deal of heartache by resisting and insisting on being my own person. When I married she wanted my wife to be tied to her apron strings. She wasn’t happy then either when I snipped the strings and put an end to endless expectations. As a result we fully enjoyed — all of us — a great many years of harmonious life thereafter — with just a relatively short period of angst and gnashing of teeth.

I know a lot of people who never take the step of asserting themselves. I’m not talking about ugly self-obsession. You don’t need to make enemies just doing your own thing. Then again in a very diverse world I suspect that the diversity of the other people in our lives means that some of them aren’t going to be easily convinced that we need to be a different way than they want for us. Yeah — those kinds of situations are hard and the route I took wouldn’t work for everyone — but that’s life, right? We have to find out what works for US. Not what works for someone else.

The upshot of all this is that during my blog silence I’ve been fussing and fretting with myself about why I wasn’t writing. I could feel the ‘need’ but I had no motivation.

I guess that’s where today’s thought really end up. Living my life meant that I had things to sort out — to process. Some of those things leant themselves to words — the occasional blog post — others didn’t — weeks of silence. Seeing as I have never tried to monetize this blog it didn’t make any difference it one person read the blog or 1000 people read it. I wasn’t losing money, and in fact more people have checked in on the blog during the quiet times than I ever would have guessed. After all, it’s just the meanderings of an aging geezer.

If you have a blog — in the days of VLOGS when not as many people want to be bothered actually keyboarding their thoughts when they could just talk into a camera — and it bothers you that you aren’t getting out as many posts — don’t worry about it. Let your body and mind do what they need to do to be happy; if you do you’ll be rewarded with newfound creativity and inspiration.

If you have a blog that you need to make money from — good luck (he says semi-sarcastically). The world changes. What worked 1 year ago may not work today. Just think of the screw machine invented back there in the 1800’s. The job of making screws was the purview of the blacksmith and that machined killed 5000 years of on-the-job seniority. Competing against vlogs and Tik Toc, and Insta, and X is a challenge and perhaps what you have always done wont cut the mustard. Just adding more clickbait gets to a point where there is too many commercials to make it worth one’s while even going to the website. I know there are a lot of blogs I no longer visit because they are saturated with advertising and lack content. Or they are just copies of someone else’s text and contain nothing new or original at all. You have to give people a reason to visit.

Anyway…. a long blog for a short topic.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.