And…Now What?

My happiness is complete as I am back on the writing porch. Few home improvements have afforded me more joy than the screened in magnificent porch that my friend, Jim Calloway, built for us in the beginning days of my retirement…2011. Twenty-eleven seems like yesterday…but it has been 10 years. Someone asked me if others enjoyed my writing….to which I replied that I did not know…but that I certainly enjoyed doing it. I think that nothing has anchored me more in my retirement years than writing on a daily basis. If I miss a day…I am sad to have done so. Mom had an old cast iron Royal Typewriter when I was a child. When I looked at that machine…I dreamed of being a writer. Mr. Feazel encouraged me to write in Eldorado High School as did Miss Barton. My favorite professor at University, Carol Burns, told me that I could achieve any university degree that I sought and my professor for Literature Analysis told the class that most of them could never to hope to write as well as an anonymous paper of mine that he read to them. Now I am certain that these gracious compliments were much over-blown and full of hyperbole…but they did stick in my mind.

Life is about finding something that you enjoy doing and then doing it. No big secret formula or special hidden map to happiness…as Nike says, ‘Just Do It!’ I have known people who were held back by their own low expectations. Fulfillment and happiness are available to you if you have the courage to change your habits or to inculcate new ones. Self realization is not in the talking about it… but in the doing…

So what comes next for we intrepid survivors of the Great 2020/2021 Pandemic? Shall we return to our insular ways and our introverted tendencies? We could ensconce ourselves in conspiracy theories and ‘Larps’ that are created to manipulate us and steer us to a hidden and destructive agenda. I have been watching a six part documentary regarding QAnon that is amazing and revealing and disturbing. Live Action Role Playing is LARP. I would be less than honest if I said that I was repelled by all conspiracy theories as I have believed since I was a youngster that President John F. Kennedy was not killed by the lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. I watched Jack Ruby gun Oswald down on live television in my living room in Eldorado, Illinois. I thought at the time that something was not right with the story of the Kennedy Assassination. The Warren Commission did not convince me other wise. However conspiracy theories have grown into hydra headed Medusas and contain within them danger and death for innocent people.

A new normal awaits our tired and longing eyes. If we have learned anything from our once in 100 year first hand experience with the Covid Pandemic…it is that we are all in this together…there is much more that unites us than divides us…we need each other to lean upon as we journey back to Jerusalem.

Rob, my committee partner on the Personnel Committee for the Session at First Presbyterian Church, emailed me today. Each time that I either speak with Rob or email him I am struck with what a wonderful and genuinely nice person that he is. Governments and Churches and Academic Committees…can do nothing but excel to excellence if they will only collaborate and not obfuscate…or work to illustrate who is the leader and who is the follower…