I'm sitting out in the heat, the last great heat of the summer of 2014 I hope. I am not looking forward to the cold. What little keeps me going these days is supported by the fact that I can go from this oppressive heat into a cold pool for an hour or so. Whether I can stand that another winter is somewhat in doubt and at the end of that is nothing.
After 3500 yards, my hair, what there is of it, has the consistency of dried out straw. I'm dehydrated from the activity inside, but my skin feels almost like it has been composted for several decades, what you'd expect from a mummy that had been exposed to moisture.
I thought about how I'd describe how my life could be described now. It is such a romantic, yet tragic story it should be written. I have written it out in outline form, but I only have half of it, so much is missing; approximately half.
It ends, "And now every day I wonder if the day before it was not too late."
But its more of a statement for me to read and not a story and if it is ever written it will only be because I write it without the sadness overwhelming the joy of being alive.
You have to embrace the horror of life to enjoy it. I learned that lesson not once but twice. The first time as a child who woke up happy one day after a life of disappointment. The second time the world was ending, and I embraced what was important to me and therefore you have Non-linear time and I learned how to be happy in the face of everything falling apart.
I thought the heat was going to kill me after swimming. I was tired, it was so hot the dog collapsed over and over on the grass headed back, the humidity would accept none of my sweat and my clothes were soaked, holding in more of the heat. How nice it would have been to wear nothing, but instead I was immersed in a wet heat, and there was nothing pleasant about it except the suffering and the life that allowed it.
So now I'm asked to to embrace the horror again, and I wonder if I can. As we get older, the horror is much more intense, the finality closer, and strangely, when I thought I was too old to feel it, the pain worse, the sense of loss greater, the sense of responsibility heavier.
But that is the lesson of happiness, the willing to embrace the horror with it.
This post is about why happiness doesn't have to be conditioned on other things, why we don't have to cling to traditional constructs. It is about life with happiness, the sacrifice of happiness for something else.
That is not part of NLT although I've been trying to get rid of this quotation for a while and this gives me an opportunity.
“You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find. Even the great initial success of the Quantum Theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one.” – Albert Einstein, 1944
Note that this was written in the middle, well sort of towards the end, of WWII. June 6, 1944 was D-day. July 16, 1945 was the first full scale explosion of a nuclear bomb. By May 8 of the following year the war ended in Europe. No atomic bomb had been dropped on an enemy at this point in time.
I suppose there is a part 2 to this, but I'm not sure if I can do it, if I can embrace the horror again.
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