SINKING IN

1/16/26

SINKING IN!

It’s over!  The holiday is past and now it sinks in---the hourly, daily, monthly, yearly task of making my life work! 

How do I move forward – as if I have a choice – or should it be ----in what capacity do I move forward? And what color will my days be and what mood will my months have and what music will swirl in my head as I take each step thru another series of moments in what is called “my life”.

Should I make a list, date it, make appoints to fulfill these---go to the gym, the chiropractor, swim, get a massage--- and of course sit in front of my computer to spill it all. What project should I put up front to get the first dabs in?  What about the book? What about all the art work that hasn’t been sold? What about, what about?

I could invent questions for myself just to seem busy.  To seem as if there is importance, something imposing to be doing. The jazz music keeps me alive and feeling so I turn it up loud to blank out my tired brain – tired of having to put things in order.

I’m an existentialist.  As soon as I discovered existentialism, I knew I had come home ---to a place where I was described, shorn naked, could roam knowing I had a name. A mental space where I had a country, a cloak that would forever be around my shoulders, whether it was warm, or old and shredded, with the wind seeping through its holes.  I am moving toward extinction and since I can’t stop it, I should as well kick and scream and dance and say fuck it!

He's gone back to his job. She’s gone back to school. The engines of the world crank on.

I remember this time… long…, but not so long ago, when we, the world were “tumulting” into, --falling into, a future of clashing ideologies, gunfights, and egos gone mad. It feels like the 1930’s all over again, even though I wasn’t there. – Something is hovering, smelling, moving into my being that feels like the history I’ve read of that time.

Clashing ideologies in one country – our country.  Technologies changing, developing faster than our minds can hold on to present moments of the reality we know. Internal political fragmentation driven by greed. Not since the 1870s has US congressional polarization been so dramatic and its effect on the American population is frightening. The gap between the North and South of the US seems as wide as it was during the Civil War.

We now see world nations seeking to change the existing international order---to rewrite rules made after WWII, rules that brought stability to countries like Taiwan, UK, Japan, cities like Hong Kong, Berlin. Today Iran, North Korea, Russia, and even the US, stage themselves on the horizon and loom large in the apparitions of future conflicts.

Will we ever have---can there ever be ---a global balance that works for all countries and all the peoples in them?  

As I sit and watch YouTube documentaries about ancient history, I begin to doubt that we have within ourselves the material needed to produce the kind of balance and equanimity I long to see in the world I live in. Human nature seems to contain too many people who are devoid of this kind of dream.  Is it a survival instinct that makes it this way, ---where greed, the desire for power, the instinct to kill anyone not on your side runs the ship.

I would say no because I firmly believe a true survival instinct is one that works for all.

Am I a dreamer?  I don’t want to wake up.

But I must say to my grandchildren:- let’s dream and weave our way thru the exceptions in a mad world because that is all we have.

Let’s listen to music, dream and dance---because that is what we have to hold on to.

And of course we have those who love us.