With this being my 300th post on this blog, please allow me some thoughts of a more personal nature, hopefully though with some relevance for all of us.
We all, I assume, want some sense of stability, of normalcy, of predictability. When we go to bed at night, we probably hope that we will wake up next day in the same space, to a situation similar to that of yesterday, certainly not worse, with the opportunity of being even better. We hope, we plan, we may sometimes consider giving up, but we hopefully move forward anyway, because, well, because we have to. Some of us may lose faith to go on, and this is understandable.
Life poses challenges to us, and many of them we have not asked for. We typically do not ask for instability in private life, and in the greater scheme of things, in politics, in the world, or even beyond; and yet, nothing is as permanent as change — a lesson I learned in my brief time in the German military.
Sometimes, we are called to do things we do not want to do, we have to prioritize duty over pleasure, and sometimes even, meaning may emerge only much later, in retrospect. Careers may not turn out to be what we had hoped, and yet, we must make the best of it, and see an opportunity to grow where stability might have invited staleness and routine. Excitement may not always be wanted due to the disruption that it is built upon. “May you live in interesting times” is a curse, after all, not a blessing; and no matter is curiously obscure origin, there lies truth in it: We may think we want to live in interesting times, but “interesting” is typically the opposite of stability, of calmness, of predictability.
When growing up in East Germany, under a brutal and mind-numbingly stifling dictatorship, I would never have thought I would be able to live the life I have lived so far. The system collapsed one day, beginning with the announcement by Günter Schabowsky on a Thursday, November 9, 1989, that the Wall, it seemed, the border to the West, could be traversed by East Germans; after that, it did not take long. The East German prison was as naked as the Soviet Empire that day. Freedom was in store rather than captivity. I mean this with no sense of hyperbole, but quite literally. The world, suddenly, had opened up.
Then, by now living on Oregon, in the United States, the mother country of freedom and opportunity (again, not hyperbole, notwithstanding all known complications), I did not predict that a global pandemic would upend my life and now see me in a quasi-lockdown after having contracted Long Covid. Yes, while most people pretend that the pandemic is over, even though it is not, some of us cannot risk reinfection, and have to imprison ourselves in a way; but this time, for me, it luckily is nature, a force I gladly prefer over a criminal regime. The irony though is not lost on me, and it is a brutal one for someone so gregarious and outgoing (yet not necessarily extrovert) like myself. Thankfully, we now have the technology and the services that allow for such a diminished life to still be functional. So I do not want to complain, but would like to see this as a warning to those who may underestimate the ongoing risk. But I am hopeful that we can find a better vaccine which will unlock this cage again. Never give up, never surrender; and depression is a waste of time.
Rather than that, reinvention, redefinition, creating a path out of potential despair, due to the necessity that life goes on, that it must go on, for otherwise would be a waste.
There are other crises demanding our attention. The war against the West, fought by the rogues gallery alliance of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea with their minions like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and whoever cannot escape their gravity. We have to hold steadfast against them, allow Ukraine to stay strong and win and become better than ever, claw back what was lost in Moldova and Georgia, find compassionate ways of healing conflicts like that imposed on Israel and Palestine by Hamas, and become again a Shining City Upon a Hill towards a world that desperately needs an updated and better version of that, with the admittedly curious personnel currently in charge in my new country. Here, again, hope and constructive engagement help more than divisionism, partisanism and demonization. This war is brought upon us; but I do not embrace war with the Russian, Chinese, Iranian and other people.
On top of that, I am following with growing curiosity all those news about UAP disclosure. Are we growing up as a species? Have we indeed evidence of non-human craft and intelligence? Who knows, who knows whether we will ever know, and whether there is anything to know.
In the meantime, we are determined as a species to make our lives even harder by continuing constructive practices. Again, most of that is outside of the control of most people, and I can only help preserve the little bit of nature around me.
So before I go to night, hearing what sounds like a racoon family rummaging through our yard, the crickets hard at work chirping, I hope to find a chance to enjoy a morning coffee, maybe saying good morning to a wandering neighborhood deer, cat or squirrel, hopefully in sunshine rather than rain, before continuing my work.
All we can do in our erratic attempts at life on this planet is to make good use of the little time we have, to contribute to the betterment of not just ourselves but those around us, and to have reached out beyond our smallest corners to the wider world, to a future still worth living. I hope, dear reader, that you do find these occasional reflections worthwhile — either here as blog entries, or on philjohn.com as poems, photographs (also here), musical compositions or old essays, or as videos on my YouTube channel. I certainly hope so, and am thankful that I can say with some certainty that I am not just reaching out into the void, but that there is some real person who may actually care. Thank you, and I hope to be living up to your expectations. Thus, allons-y!
Erratic Attempts 