November 5 is election day. No matter the election outcome, I anticipate celebrating our granddaughter’s 5th birthday upon that day.

Last evening afforded little rest. I woke with troubling dreams at odd times before daybreak Then I felt disoriented.

Sometimes in waking life, I feel at a decision point, and my sense of things is unclear. I feel that just beyond my grasp, something is obscured from my understanding. Nevertheless peer pressure, influence from authority figures (parents, a pastor, spouse or media pundits) urge me to act upon their direction. My sensation of hazard is only heightened. It is as if I am trapped in a wheel, a rotating kaleidoscope of falling shards… The gut-sense that action is imperative, that ‘not to act’ is also ‘to act’…

Waking life is often like a troubled night of insufficient rest. Authority voices insisting that I follow convention, to do the “right thing.” And if the right thing isn’t enough? Voices add to my confusion, as my better judgment whispers patience. Waiting until yammering, shouting, violent voices are finished – seems the path of reason.

Think! Think! Think!

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How must we act?
Why must we act?

So far as the coarse and immediate needs of the individual
are concerned, it is easy to answer these questions,
but the more we enter upon the more important
and more subtle domains of action,
the more does the problem become uncertain
and the more arbitrary its solution.

An arbitrary decision, however,
is the very thing that
must be excluded
here,

—thus commands the authority of morals:

an obscure uneasiness and awe must relentlessly guide
man in those very actions the objects and means of which he
cannot at once perceive.

This authority of morals undermines our thinking faculty
in regard to those things concerning which
it might be dangerous
to think wrongly,

—it is in this way, at all events,
that morality usually justifies itself to its accusers.

Wrong in this place means dangerous;
but dangerous to whom?
It is not, as a rule,
the danger of the doer of the action
which the supporters of authoritative morals have in view,
but their own danger;

the loss which their power and influence
might undergo
if the right to act
according to their own greater or lesser reason,
however willfully and foolishly,
were accorded to
all men/women.

The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 107