The Magic in My Life

“Better than a thousand hollow words

Is one word that brings peace.”

~ Dhammapada, The Sayings of the Buddha

- Oliver affirms life – not because he looks like me but because he's my son and because, through the fact of his existence, he's an affirmation that I can create and create on a heart's scale and more, as opposed to the simplicity of destruction with which I often felt more at ease.
- José Saramago's novels exist.

- Becky “took away all of my reasons not to care” in ways both practical and invisible.

- There are roughly seven billion people on this planet.

- As I write this, I am sitting on a bed on the second floor of a building. That building sits upon a tiny round rock that is currently hurtling around a medium-size plasma orb at 67,000mph. That orb of plasma is currently traveling through an interstellar cloud it entered roughly 44,000 to 150,000 years ago. I could go on about our location within the Orion Spiral Arm in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars – but let's stop there, for now.

- The music I loved as a teenager still moves me but the lyrics take on new meaning.

- The boy who thought he'd not live to see 18 is now 27.

- Faerie figurines are perched all around me.

- My wife had a short story accepted for publication – on her first attempt at submitting work since 2010 or earlier.

- Inside this apartment building there are people all around me, just on the other side of the walls or floors, living out their lives just as oblivious to me as I often am to them.

- There are three furry felines in the living room – just sitting in there, like it's the most natural thing in the world for them to be there.

- Joy Division

- My son is currently sleeping and sighing while he does so.

- I am the improbable sum of all of my ancestors.

- iLiKETRAiNS

- Hamlet (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2009)

- Whether we will it or not, we are all bound to one another.

My Best Self

Here I am.

This is the part where I've covered quite a bit of ground and I try, in this moment of relative silence, to find my best selves.

In a way, I believe that even though there is only one physical self, each moment of my life has been lived by a unique self – a self that can never be totally replicated in all of its attributes but can be remembered and, if worth remembering, modeled.

It sounds almost metaphysical but I really believe it's simply a tidy way of examining life.

Let me go back a moment.

I don't generally examine my life. I do examine almost all else.

My interests, some of them passions, range from genealogy to video games, from science fiction to the social sciences, from poetry to basketball to Buddhism. It's a helter-skelter hodgepodge of pursuits and this tendency extends to my taste in music, films, books, etc.

It is distracting.

Yet in all of these pursuits, and all of these interests, I rarely, if ever, take the time to journal or keep a diary, even to simply try to capture a few key moments of each day. My life has gone by as a series of sparse and garbled spiral notebooks, digital camera images, and half-digested memories.

So now it falls to me to try to find an example of my best self. A self worth cataloging and, most importantly, worth emulating.