A Skip and a Song

Taking it easy!

I used to be in awful fear of kids in my youth. Unfortunately some of that came to be established in me as a disregard for playfulness, not knowing, the beginning of learning and in turn transformed my attitudes into a practice of hidden arrogance. But my fear of kids was real … and was in reference to the cultivation of a logical mind in all its possible applications to life. It caused me to think about God, life and death, justice … especially in the way I came to regard kids in their childish and expectant innocence.

It pursued me into my pre-adult years. I may be speaking to a bunch of people and suddenly … experience a self conscious awareness that crept surreptitiously from their eyes into an inquiry about ' how I came to know,' or the friendly trust of acceptance of my words at good faith. It bothered me that I wasn't more sure. Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King, reported in an interview that her husband would on occasion go through severe pangs of guilt and suffer the inquiries into his causes and their basis of fair play.

The issue revolves around the way that our actions impact upon the lives of others … in a very real sense … and the implications of that to our own considerations of accountability. Its therefore reassuring to run into folk who say ' its God's will ' … ' its the American way ' … or ' a man does what he can.' Still we encounter the slight trace of melancholy … in a mind grown active with learning to know for certain.

I expect that in all our dealings … we respond to a social convention of the times regarding what we know and can reasonably come to extend that with our own gut feelings on the issue. It pre-supposes that our intuitiveness on the issue … drawn from a manner of our birth … destiny … and a social relation with our peers … creates the raison d'etre … as justification for our actions. In such a view we encounter … the regard we create about our position as defensible … and our willingness to subject ourselves to all manner of inquiry into our issues.

There are occasions that we respond with ' if we knew then what we know now … ' and this becomes the hard rock of the bed that we must thereafter sleep with. But even then it is possible to engage the usual civilities regarding the issue … we can offer an apology … we can offer to make restitution … we can appeal for understanding … or where the view comes from the eyes of God … we can offer to undertake redemption. The point of course is to say that ' we don't know everything at any one time ' … but we are prepared to apply the usual courtesies according to the social custom.

A man gets away with bringing doubt to a boss's ability to do his work … takes over the position and in turn suffers the same fate … at the hands of a younger colleague … some years later. Poetic justice? Does that suffice to create satisfaction for an injury sustained? … or do we accept such an event as fair and equitable? Our ability to do so is governed by the extent to which we understand the physical world and its relation to issues of the passion. They are both tied in to the proper restoration of satisfaction on the issues.

In the grand scheme of things … the way that these two issues come to a coincidence with each other … is the optimization of our experiences as human … and the epistemology we discover as the basis of human knowledge. This is the stuff of life that poet's exclaim with joy … and the man of the cloth refers to as the mysterious ways of the lord. As a scheme that combines both intelligence and passions … it lends itself to be viewed as the play of love … or the skip and song of intelligence. Combined this way … its that which adrenalin responds to as motivation … adventure and entertainment.

Its what a man discovers when he devotes himself to the daily fires of diligence. Beyond the career ... its more than the immediate rewards he seeks from a life lived with some element of social service. Its the way his actions contribute to the make-up of the human genus … and its birth in the social conscience. Its the needle of the weaver … putting in place every thread of impulse … in the embroidery of human existence.