It is Friday.  I’ve got almost nothing to write.

What does it mean “to be” here, to exist, to be located in Starbucks at 7:15 AM on a Friday morning?  What links my being, to my physical position in space and time, here-now?

The room is quite full, humming with voices and movement.  I could take a poll, moving from table to table, interrupting each “guest” with a single question: “why are you here?”

Is there an explanation?  That is, — a reason?  If there is — the reason is certain to be concealed.  Concerning my “thought experiment” the encounters with patrons would certainly be felt as an intrusion.

Who of us knows why we are here or anywhere else?  Is there a cosmic ballet, or divine providence, or a concatenation, blind and dumb of cause and effect…  Just a few options of many more…  Pick whatever metaphor best fits your mood!  There’s nothing else in our toolbox but such metaphors…

Nietzsche wrote that Luther’s Protestant Reformation helped to constitute the meaning-of-being-German.  By extension one could say the same for us Americans.  This upper midwest was settled by northern European immigrants.

The peasant rebellion rolls on!  We peasants!

…who would be naive enough
to praise or blame Luther
on account of these consequences?

He is innocent of everything; he did not
know what he was doing.

The European spirit became shallower,
particularly in the north
— more good-natured,
if you prefer a moral term,
and there is no doubt that this development
advanced a large step with the Lutheran Reformation.

The mobility and restlessness of the spirit,
its thirst for independence, its faith in a right to liberty,
its “naturalness”
–all this also grew
owing to the Reformation.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 5, Section 358 by Friedrich Nietzsche

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Perhaps you’d rather paint it pink, or sky blue?  What is chosen matters…  The color is up to you and I.