I'm just really numb and surprisingly, a tid-bit angry right now. I'm grated when someone whines on the bus. So I bark at them. I'm huffy when someone calls. I'm non-plussed when someone doesn't. I'm started because I have so much left. I'm flustered because I am wondering why I don't have enough. I'm pissed that I'm pissed and edgy and cantankerous right now, and in the grand scheme of things, I can't find any corner in this known universe that grants me the right to be. I feel a bit of sickliness coming on again. At night time I've been dreaming of climbing mountains and wrecking in cars, flipping several times and walking away, lamenting and weeping over the fact that I survived the un-survivable.

I am brooding over the realm of death, not as one frightened, but as one curious to know what my friends' existences are like now. What are they thinking? What are they looking at just this moment? What are they planning to do? Who are they talking to? What are the parameters of their consciousness? What was the transition like from this abode to that next one? How deep was that valley?

I am also taken in by the sustaining graces beautifully displayed by Amy, the LP community, Renee and her family and am grateful to be in the vicinity of these examples treading the path we may all take one day.

So I ride around in circles for a meager wage and this is the life? Funny how we all go about living as if we won't ever die. Myriad are all the ways we laugh, joke, assume this or that, without fathoming our impending demise. I just hope I am not found living my life as if I'm on death-avoidance. That kind of living just ignores the important things....like this moment, right now, like connecting with my wife on a deeper level than I have tonight, like bearing some hurts out to a friend and finding he feels the same. There must be a solidarity and unity of purpose to this semblance of a life I have and it must be spent soberly and wisely, fully cherishing my path and the trouble (both real and perceived) entertained. And I get to do this with the people I have now and the Lord I woefully don't fully appreciate as the connecting thread of meaning and vitality through it all.

But the compulsion of the Christ directs me to live not headlong toward debilitating death-mindedness. That is hogwash too.

It was said (I think by Heidegger) that until we have contemplated the fact of our own deaths, only then can we truly know how to live. Well, on second thought, here is what he actually said, and even though he is considered atheistic, the following applies with one caveat (below the quote):

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.”

The first part is our responsibility. The anxiety and freedom part....well, that belongs ultimately to God insofar as we bear our anxiety and pettiness to him. That must be the realm of freedom from ourselves and our circumstances.