Hope for the Best. Expect Nothing. Do the Possible.

Almost half way through the first half of the last third (with any, luck?) of my life and some of my views have changed.

Most days are a bit overcast, with some drizzle or showers in the morning, the setting Sun a relief of another day and cautious expectations of the next.

Clouds, some small and scudding along, others slow, growing and gathering only to disperse as they move along, rather than across, the horizon.

Weather in the Fall, predicable within the context of the climate I am in. Four seasons and the world is changing. It would be changing without the drama too, but it sure is easier to apprehend the impermanence of life from my multi-directional vantage point. Earth in upheaval. Cognitive re-ordering and memory/truth re-ordering some becoming more clear some more fixed. And, still the ability to not only learn new things but to help the new re-order the old. That’s a good thing.

There’s no bad thing. There are uncomfortable things and things I wish were different, yet all things either come to me as teaching or as some perceived reward or punishment. Of course reward and punishment are teachings, but only if I don’t take them personally. The Good and Bad are merely opinions that I tend to cherish, if I’m not careful.

I am not the problem. I am the opportunity to see things differently. I have an array of choices.

At some point I chose to change my life by letting go of the problems that alcohol and drugs caused in my life. As I started out on that process I thought if I stopped drinking and drugging my life would get better and I would see with more clarity what I needed to do. Yikes! Did I ever.

I saw that I had to change everything about me, and lot of it in tandem (A type of simultaneous but different.), between what I thought, believed, and what I did. Inwardly and outwardly.

Turns out, that’s a lifetime process and a purpose.

Here I sat last night, after some months of spiritual, mental and physical discomforts; listening to the Giants vs. Dodgers, Giants lost:(There’s always tomorrow), and reading TYRANT Shakespear on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt; a terrific book that gives a deeply historical, literary and understanding compassionate view of modern times which seem to have many of us befuddled and at odds within and without, as of old. There is nothing new under the Sun.

It struck me as as contradictory with what I espouse as a way of being, but when have any of us never been full of contradictions which tend to resolve themselves by their very existence? Never, that’s when.

Choosing to be and to try and

See contradiction within and

Without, between you and me,

All is One, All is Different.

So plain, so close, so far, so me.