By Friday, the bribery I've used all week to get me out of bed and to work can itself take a rest. This weekend will be the first one in ages where there won't be rain. Things haven't dried up enough for us to want to dig in the adobe again, but at least I could work on finding the backyard under all the weeds if I wanted to. Tomorrow, S starts her new ballet (although Thurs. was a preview "makeup" class), and R has riding lessons. Sunday I'll have BIC time. And somewhere in there, I'll get a couple more runs in. Today, it was 6 miles on the treadmill, some of which was "pick-ups" where I pushed myself until I was breathing hard. It turns out that breathing hard at the end of a longer run now means 8 miles per hour where it once meant 6.5. Still slow by many runners' standards, but I'm happy with the change. The head cold I've had honestly seems to be clearing up, although I could still try to get a spot on radio or in disreputable phone work with my voice.
Clare says she's made this page her home page! Wow, am I honored. And it gives me even more incentive to write. I wish I had something more interesting to say than "had tea with Mr & Mrs. J" but really that's what this blog often gets down to. So sue me. It's a journal, folks. :)
Here's the philosophical thought I had before I sat down to write, though. I'd fallen asleep on the couch with the girls - all of us in a big snoring pile of arms and legs and blanket - while D was on the phone with his best friend (a nightly occurrence), and when I got up to put the girls to bed, I was feeling (for the moment) unlovely and unloved.
I recognized the feeling and let it go and am now fine - especially easy once I remembered all of the many blessings in my life, including the love of family and friends. But that low moment also led to an epiphany ("I just had an apostrophe!" as Smee would say. )
Those of us walking the earth who feel unlovely and unloved are capable of great harm to ourselves and others. We have nothing to lose. We feel we are justified in striking out. This is old news - thousands of books and plays and true life crime stories and statistics have been born of this very well-known concept. I just understood it more clearly tonight than I have before. Does this mean that one angry unloved person who has hurt other people can always be won back by the love of one other person? Always? No, I think not. I think that violence and self-righteous self-loathing have their own addictive qualities that are hard to fight. Is love as addictive? If one is addicted to it, is it really love? No, I think not. But how else to explain the majority of us moths searching for a light to fly into? For Plato, it was the Forms looking for the Ideal, if I remember correctly. For others, it's something else. Something to do with God or the Universe. Obviously, it's time to read more. Not just Tolle, but also from some of the scores of philosophy books I still have from college. I was just a few credits shy of being a Philosophy Major, after all. I'm a moth trying to read the map on my wings.
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