Monday Morning Rain
I did not make the car show yesterday morning. I have a pang of regret.
From this angle of view there is no sign of yesterday’s show from my table by the big Starbucks window. The white archway marking the grand entry to 3rd Street, to the promenade by the double line of parked, gleaming vintage automobiles, and the restaurants along 3rd Street, is gone, has disappeared. Does the absence on this rainy Monday morning mean that nothing happened? Does it mean that whatever happened yesterday amounts to nothing, having no significance to this dim and cloudy moment? Are events hermetically sealed, having no connection with successive events?
Such foolish thinking…… I know that cannot be the case, an absurd notion that things, events, and persons are disconnected. Are not all connected in a vast, inconceivable web of relationships?
The workmen, or women in Detroit, or Deerborn Michigan who operated the massive sheet metal forming and cutting brakes, that formed the fenders of any number of the cars displayed have passed on. They have joined our ancestors. Their work remains. The result of lives lived echoes on, and will always echo into the future.
What happened yesterday, the concours de’Elegance car show which I wish I had visited is formative of today, of this rainy day, and of this cup of coffee in my hand at Starbucks.
As a matter of brute causal fact, the universe we live in would collapse like a house of cards if some malevolent higher power plucked out of the causal web the lowest member of the army of Alexander the Great, or your third cousin twice removed. It is not poetry but the most relentless logic of cause and effect that demonstrates that the last breath of Julius Caesar is my morning cup of coffee; the entire universe is a speck of dust; and I am you. A universe without you, or even a universe without this particular grain of sand, is as completely fictional as Hogwarts or House Lannister.
— excerpt from Taking Back Philosophy, A multicultural Manifesto by Bryan W. Van Norden. P. 50
2 thoughts on “Monday Morning Rain”
Made me reflect that reality may actually only be the here and now that we have. And, that any other thinking about it may only be a distraction that, in a way, takes us away from the very moment of reality we are in…perhaps because it’s all really too much for us to take in, so we begin to dissect it, fractionalize it, marginalize it, politicalize it, try to inject the past/present into it…all to remove us from it because it really is all too much for us. As, unlike the Creator of all, we need to process life as a world of relativity rather than as a wholeness of being, because we are wired this way by the blueprint of our own being created and brought into this world. Although, a case can be made that a young child may still be able to do so being so near still to their recent separation from the Creator, although with some discipline we may still as adults be able glimpse that enlightened reality, if we can remember it is always there.
Just thoughts provoked by your thought provoking writing, Jerry!
Jeff
Jeff perhaps the child has the disadvantage of a nearly empty storehouse of memories. Could that be why children are such voracious sponges of language? They need the categories to properly file their day to day experience which is every bit new. You mention the adult proclivity for distraction, for avoiding engagement with reality. Yes, that can be the case especially if the past has been so painful that the subject is well motivated to avoid more of the same. My halting comments about reality had to do with reality as a joint creation of everything that has gone before, our ancestors, past events, whether of five minutes ago, 5 years or 500 years ago. All of this figures in, — though hidden to our senses and awareness, the raw material that impinges upon us as we create reality. I want to say that reality is a joint creation. Heaven or hell is spun from the matrix of relationship, and nothing is outside of the dance.