Saturday, April 14, 2018
Sometimes, the most momentous events are most easily forgotten.
This morning on my walk from the hotel to church, I was puzzling over how it is some folk just do not believe in responsibility. With its correlates of honesty, truth-telling and personal power. (There is no power without responsibility.) I may never come to understand; some people are in “places” where I may not be able, or may be unwilling, to go; and I may be best to just accept that that may be the case.
How can they be enamored of chaos? How can they seek a world without accountability? Yet, in their world, there is accountability: everyone’s accountable to whatever predator is at the top of the food chain; and they esteem that person:
U respect the one who got shot I respect the shooter.
— JayZ, “Thirtysomething”
I said, “Why am I thinking about this? Shouldn’t I be thinking about getting my own place?”
I’ve spent so much time focused on poverty and its causes that I became very poor. If I’m to become upwardly mobile, I need to think about upward mobility.
But I can only think about getting my own place for so long. I did, and then turned my attention to the here and now as I walked; this car, that lamppost, the traffic light.
As I continued this, I thought about my current theory of courage. The current draft of “Ownership of power” consists of one sentence: “It’s hard to believe it can be so simple.”
My next memory is of being in the church kitchen, preparing the next pot of coffee. I came to focus on the here-and-now: the basket in my hand, the coffee filters in the basket, the coffee grounds in the filter, and my intention to take them to the coffee station. I recalled the mission to present my best self every moment; this moment; and it came to me that this may be enough. This may be all I need to attend to, from moment to moment, in life. Everything elsewhere, or past or future, let go. And it seemed right.
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