...

This is where I'm starting. It's as good as any other place to start. I am tempted to say that it is, perhaps, a little late but they say that the best time to start is before and the second best time to start is now. I'll take second best for a first outing.

I won't apologize in advance for not having anything particular to say at the moment. I'm just at the start of things. I don't know what lies ahead of me yet, and I don't know if the idea I initially had will continue to be what it currently is or mutate into something else. Bigger, smaller, wiser, more foolish... it doesn't really matter at the end of the day, does it?

I should be clear that I don't consider myself a nihilist. Well, not a nihilist by the definition that I think is contemporary. I don't believe that there's no point to anything. Sure I've said that out loud in the depths of a depressive episode or to make light of a minor inconvenience, but I don't think I really mean it. I once saw a video from Kurzgesagt about Optimistic Nihilism and I think I'm that. Something like that. I like Absurdism. Again, not the popular definition that I first experienced in the early 2000s but the way Camus talks about it. Some find it depressing (and it can be) but I usually find it inspiring. Uplifting even. Sometimes. Not right after reading his work, but after it settles and the shock wears off.

I read The Plague recently. I thought I had read it before. I most certainly had not. In a world with COVID it hits harder than it would have had I actually read it before. The behaviors, the outcomes, the lessons, all heard learned in our modern world and laid out so plainly in a book written before many of us living now were even a dream. Not even us, the world we currently live in would have been unimaginable then. For so many reasons.

I hope it taught me something about grief and perseverance. I think it did. I say "hope" because I know all too well what happens when we put ouselves under stress without practice. If you don't test your lessons they fall apart. There's my martial arts wisdom for the day. I'll always try to sneak it in.

I wonder if that's the thing missing in the last five to six years. Maybe the whole last decade. There's this sense, at least here in the United States, that we don't have to adapt. That the world is still as it was even though it must be changing. That doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, but the common thread to me is that we all say we're learning but we fall back to the same patterns at the first sign of trouble. The silos of political tribes, of casting doubts on our neighbors or the others. To me it's clear that our problems are in perception. Maybe I'm missing the lesson too.

Today's Track: Ripple Dance - Casiopea