So It Goes
It's been a year since I started posting SetonnoteS commentaries on the Internet. I can't say that it has dramatically changed my life, but it certainly has contributed to a greater feeling of well-being in myself, and I trust has provided some measure of clarity for you. While it was never my intention to propagandize or convince, I did hope that I would offer enough evidence or distance in a train of thought to sometimes encourage people to keep their minds open to new possibilities.
We're living at a very dynamic time. I don't think that most people realize how much has changed, how rapidly, and how we are not nearly through processing what we've been through already. As people alive for the past several decades, as a species that may have exceeded itself in development. I think of our nuclear weapons; we have pioneered our own extinction. And of the communications technologies of computers, satellites, and the Internet. I think the latter revolution is the key to our survival of the former.
There must be a purpose to the 15 billion years of evolution that has us sharing the only planet in the universe known to have life. I mean, what a coincidence, and secondly, what are we to do with this fact. Have you figured out why you're here? What is your role? Do you feel a sense of participation, of obligation, of importance?
Over the past year, my rollercoaster continued, but in a way that felt more secure, even as I found myself less connected to my own life. I'm not trying to spout gobbledygook; it sometimes just flows, kinda like a first draft of a thought. For the longest time, I connected a feeling of security with a sense of control of my life. For better or worse, I took responsibility for what was happening. If life wasn't going well, according to my lights, it was my own fault. It wasn't my time, I wasn't working hard enough, something else was to come.
About two years ago, Buster and I were sweltering through our daily constitutional and the thought came to me, What if everything's all right? Meaning, what if the grander power of the universe — I call it the larger reality — actually was on top of the situation; that the failure and horror that seemed to describe a lot of public activity were what was supposed to be happening, according to the grander scheme of things that I was not enfranchised to understand.
It was quite an uplifting thought. Regrettably, over the past year, though by almost every measure my life circumstances are improving, I felt the security of thinking that everything was all right slipping away. In tandem with that slide into darkness, I've also felt less of a need to control. To not take things personally. "So it goes," was Vonnegut's essential dismissal of the horrors he saw in World War II.
The dialectic between thinking and feeling is a marvelous dance, if only I would recognize it as such. Let's see what happens.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.