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The Life of Your VOTE!

There comes a moment in a lifetime where there are no choices left except to stand up to a demon, face the torture of the confrontation, and either accept your death, or condemn your victory. Some fortunate folk in the world may never have to make that choice between the devil and the doom. Unfortunately, for us, we who live in America, that time for the deconstruction of the “them,” and resurrection of the “us,” is now; right now, and we either die trying to escape, or we earn the right to live free again under the magnificent wonder of what we once always believed was a democracy.

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Calcification of Sorrow

Life is about letting go, starting over, and grief on the way to the grave. In between those monumental stations of human being, we endeavor to find contentment, discover joy, and save friendships from perishing. Here is how Vincent van Gogh drew to know sorrow in 1882.

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Leave Behind Amber, Not Accolades

As we age into society, there are certain human truths we not only begin to learn, but then start to live — and it is in moments like those, like the one we’re sharing now in the rare “long form” live read on the internet — that I want to urge you to abandon the trophies and the tricks and the cunning surrounding our lives and to instead leave behind something that matters, footfalls suspended in amber, creating your own fossil record.

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Remembering Over Reinventing: Obituaries and the Unnamed

As we creep closer to sliding into our graves, we cannot help but look back over the arc of our lives and be tempted to wonder what is and what might have been.  There’s no regret in the ongoing evaluation of who we are and what we intended to become.

I always found it odd, and a little off-putting, growing up as a child in the Midwest, and having the older folks around me scan the obituaries page in the daily newspaper.

Looking for deaths — sometimes with both hope and regret — was maudlin and a little frightening to me, but the obit page was the final period on the end of a single image forged in sweat and hope against an impending darkness.  You were okay to be forgotten as long as the descriptive bits of you found final ink on a page.

Now that I live in the New York City area, and moved by both time and tide, I cannot help but be driven by my Midwestern DNA to scan the obituaries page of the New York Times.  It’s a wildly different experience reading the East Coast death roll call because these were the famous, and the infamous, and we are expected to remember them longer than the same sort of dead friends reported from the farmlands and valleys of the regular clarion — but we won’t.

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1.  Drug Laws Are Fair

2.  We Must Always Help Each Other

3.  The Boy Scouts of America are All-Inclusive

4.  Terrorism Only Happens on Foreign Soil

(more…)

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The Asynchronous Lives in Parallel Project

Our lives are performed in dramatic arcs that intersect and reflect and repulse and reflex:  Are we divinely predestined or merely reflexive?  The other day, I was thinking back on when I was a young child and, feeling alone and frustrated, I would climb a cherry tree in our backyard to get away from all the noise and hubbub of earthly living.  From my vantage point 20 feet in the air, I could smell the wind and get a sense of a horizon that was far and above my current station.

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At Night, I Get Scared

Today is the third day in a row I’m writing about the death of the great author and teacher, Dr. Howard Stein, because I just can’t get his life out of my mind.  Every time we’d meet or speak on the phone, I would take copious notes because I didn’t want to forget anything he told me.

Every conversation was ripe and ready for memorialization in a blog post or in a future thinking endeavor.  Howard Stein was always teaching, and when you had his attention, you were the most important person in the world to him.  He was staunchly rational and fearless almost up to the end; and I say “almost” because during the last few months of his life, he confessed to me that, at night, he would get scared.

https://i0.wp.com/boles.com/called/12/scared.jpg?resize=498%2C535

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