life making sense

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“I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.”

 

 

 

Winston S. Churchill

 

 

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Whew.

 

 

 

It is a new year. 2016. The first time I have typed that.

 

 

sigh charlie

What kind of year will it be? Well. I admit. I woke up this morning … checked the online papers … and gave a long sigh of relief.

 

 

No terrorism as we transition into a new year..

 

 

What an odd feeling.

 

I didn’t celebrate a new year.

 

I wasn’t feverishly planning how to take over the world in the new year.

 

 

 

I simply began it with a sense of relief.

 

 

But that is today’s world. It seems like on the heels of what feels like a couple of turbulent years in a row it has become the new norm … this feeling I had. Now … it is not really fear it is simply a sense of foreboding.

 

It is the feeling of the inevitable of something bad happening. It doesn’t mean we don’t do the things we don’t want to do just that … well … we wake up in the morning to check if something bad happened and maybe give a small sigh of relief and go on sigh of relief typewith our Life.

 

 

Here is the deal though.

 

I never thought I would ever be thankful viewing a new year with a sense of relief. Especially in 2014 when we began 2015.

 

 

 

On December 30th 2014 I wrote this:

 

 

Someone asked me to explain 2014 … I hesitated … and then I said “it was the year of fear.”

 

It would have been easy to suggest it was a year of anger … or intense negativity … or a seemingly relentless crisis and end up all the way to an overall anger at society <or ‘the system’ … whatever the system is>.

 

2014 was the year of fear.

 

Let’s make 2015 the year of unfear.

Yet.

 

2015 was anything but unfear … in fact … it seemed to ratchet up the fear. It got ratcheted up so far that it almost became anger … and anger directed at the institutions … the institutions which we may not realistically demand security from but certainly expect it.

 

The system was failing us and while pundits claimed we needed to manage our fear they were missing the point. It wasn’t fear. It was foreboding.

 

A belief the system, that which has always done fairly well for us, is now failing us.

 

 

And it wasn’t just in security but in almost every aspect of every institution. It wasn’t just government <albeit we seem to spend a shit load of time beating the crap out of the government> but banks and shipping companies and online retail and mobile technology companies … it was every institution we could think of.

 

 

Why wouldn’t we feel such foreboding … the institutional infrastructure around us seemed incredibly flawed.

 

 

But it was also in 2014 that I tried to explain how we got to where we are:

 

 

Why did it seem so bad?

 

 

One word: “exogenous.”

Exogenous events are events impossible to predict.

 

 

The world is strewn with exogenous events … events impossible to predict.

 

And the world is also strewn with assholes with access to media <who love to put these assholes onscreen> who love to treat exogenous events as rational predictable events <and therefore someone can be blamed>.

 

And the world is strewn with everyday schmucks <people> who love to believe exogenous events are anything but exogenous.

 

 

 

Regardless.

 

 

All that really matters is that things that are impossible to predict create fear among normal everyday people. And when exogenous events occur we feverishly attack institutions for their lack of perfection. We become incredibly unforgiving and at the same time offer solutions as if we were all smart enough to do any job that any institution does.

 

But even all our irrational behavior has a rational core.

 

At our core we want to seek a sense of relief from everyday grind … not have to feel relief from a larger sense of insecurity, instability & an innate sense that Life is even more unfair than we think it should be.

That is a bigger feeling I tend to believe most of us not only do not want to bear the burden of but actually do not believe we should have to bear the burden.

 

 

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“People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been–for a moment’s relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary.”

inevitable fear gloom changeAyn Rand

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I believe all of us don’t believe it has to be easy … just maybe a little easier.

 

And maybe we don’t seek peace of mind we may simply desire a little ease of mind.

 

 

Do I see that happening in 2016?          Honestly … no.

 

I think I am not alone in carrying around some sense of foreboding. It certainly doesn’t over ride my daily behavior nor does it make me any less optimistic with regard to getting shit done and finding some joy & happiness in 2016. It just means that everywhere I go, every morning I wake up in the foreseeable future I will encounter at least a small sense of relief if nothing bad happened that day.

 

 

I didn’t like the feeling I had this morning <albeit I liked it much better than if something bad had happened> and I really don’t like the thought that I cannot see it going away for the foreseeable future.

 

But we people are resilient.

 

We typically, unflinchingly, face adversity because we understand the choice … the choice that … well … we have choices. And by making choices we take Life out of the hands of fate from which point we can be hopeful rather than just optimistic.

 

I read somewhere that ‘to have hope requires courage, strength, resilience and the desire to work for the common good. To be optimistic requires no work on our part, to be hopeful does.’

 

Sigh.

 

 

 

A sense of relief on the first morning on the first day of the year as my first strong emotional thought.

 

It seems to shape a very low bar for the year.

 

 

And, yet, I am also fairly sure that at some point someone smarter than me will point out that most people can handle fear fairly rationally … but that we need to address this nagging sense of foreboding.

 

Somehow someone will figure out how to explain to everyone that this gray load of foreboding which seems so inexplicable and unnecessary is … well … a reflection of exogenous events … irrational unpredictable events.

 

 

Because if we can manage that … if we can somehow explain it in some rational acceptable way … most people will unhesitatingly apply the courage, strength, resilience and desire to work for the greater common good.

 

optomist hope

While shaken a little, personally, when I examined how I felt this morning I remain hopeful for 2016.

 

 

I remain hopeful that our institutions are not as bad as we tend to try and make them.

 

 

I remain hopeful that the watchers … the ones who explore exogenous events with the intent to circumvent them or abort them … remain vigilant and do what they do <which I perceive is a shitload better than many people think they do it>.

 

I remain hopeful that our anger at our institutions turns to a healthy involvement in shaping a world in which we end up creating new ways of doing things and new ways to think about things.

 

 

And, mostly, I remain hopeful that on the morning of January 1, 2017 my first thought will not be a sense of relief.

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Written by Bruce