by Shaun Lawton
It's a new year and everything's so messed up, it seems as if there's no way to even begin to convey the amplitude of it all. Allow me to give it a shot, anyhow. It's on a scale overwhelming our ability to register how much we'd have to invest in preparing for it. I mean, let's face it, we're still dealing with the fallout from our former lives, which in my case, spilled out over here out west of the Mississippi just over a quarter century ago, when I rebooted my life after my first marriage fell apart, and I decided to follow a calling to head out west.
Now here we all are during a time when the technolarity (I've decided to call it) is well into it's nth iteration, and I'd like to note the reality of it has nothing to do with any other scenario ever conceived by any human alive today. It's beyond our grasp in a way that very few among us could even consider preparing for it in a manner that would seem sound, considering the implications hidden from our understanding in the quantum realm, and everything else going on in our daily lives we're forced to confront and process. Yet isn't that the game we relish, the ultimate whodunit, poring over the clues to our existence? Well, at least speaking for myself, it doesn't exactly keep me up at night, but it keeps me going.
One of the great mysteries we all face concerns itself over the peculiar and often overlooked fact that assigning blame to anyone for something they've done against us may ultimately amount to folly, and here's why I say this. We fail to consider the platform upon which we all play our roles, including those we feel are the ones to blame for any given circumstance which affects us negatively. For example, if a boss were to fire you, and it was true they did it to railroad you off the team in order to replace you with someone they could pay less, for example, yes that would appear to be sufficient cause on their behalf by which you could justifiably blame them. But what if I were to suggest that it may not be so simple as that?
Let me try to explain what I mean. The world isn't new, and no matter how much of the latest ceramic and cable facades may have been recently manufactured and layered underneath us, in the forms of our new homes and streets and grocery stores and shopping malls, the primeval earthmatter yet lies underneath, and all around; a vast proto-magnetic generator of forces that remain quite beyond our comprehension. Suffice it to say, the channeling power of our planet tranceives seismic voltages and vibrations tremoring throughout its core and crust, sending waves across Poseidon's kingdom and flashes networks of lightning into a new dawn of this terribly advanced age of techno-sorcery.
The truth isn't just limited to the fact that there may be other, greater parties responsible for factors which influence our bosses to summarily dismiss us, or whatever the case may be; no, not at all. There's a greater perspective and observation of nature itself which shifts our point of view. It's not the lion's quality alone that drives it to prey upon the zebras and gazelles, it includes a set of greater factors that play into the scenario, an incomprehensible backdrop far from those stray, individual mammals grazing and preying along the tundra, under our brilliant shining star, still dazzling through the mantle of the sky overhead. There remains a vast system, so inexplicable and cauldronic in scope and organization, of such a supramagnetic and hyperelectric gravitational structure that the very intricacy of its interwoven and counter-shifting parts interpenetrating in unexpected domino effects that operate like intermeshing zippers, in a constant evolution, adapting to shifting conditions which change form while interlacing components morph into different shapes.
These forces affect every dynamic we can think of, including the wind and sea-spray and the global configuration of intermixed wildflower pollens, mycelial networks feeding on the decomposition of forest loam and the constant exchange of chemicals and energy going on within our biodome, to name a mere fraction of the slightest percentage representing the thriving ecological diversity of life on Earth, a continuum wholly linked in a succession of fractalized gears which creates side effects still rippling from forces that way down here on this section of the evolutionary chain, we consider to be physical laws we don't as of yet fully understand, like gravity and time and outer space, and many more interrelated concepts such as these we yet remain uninformed about, including the ones partly responsible for the things that might go wrong in our lives, and cause us, in a moment of reactionary weakness, to point the blame at individuals which appear to be responsible, when in reality, there could just as easily be a greater combination of forces at work, unbeknownst to us, which for all we know, render events to fall apart for everyone, (including that boss that let you go), a significant difference remaining, that we each exist in our own respective micromoments of time, separate from one another in a way we can barely begin to imagine, by microinstants which due to their temporarily having lined up into synchronicity, invariably trick us into assuming we're occupying the same exact place & time, when we're in point of fact separated by worlds apart, across the vast face of time itself, and in reality only briefly exchanging our mutual presence with one another, while the whole universe continues on its grand, counterintuitively orderly scale of time that as far as we've been able to determine, eventually expires in galactic periodicities tantamount to our own, and that of every one else alive here caught up in this grand continuum along with us, somewhere adjacent to our wake, just ahead, beside, or before us, as we all fly on together, each separately, and out into the parallel chevrons of disintegrating memory that represent the avatars of our existence.
This is only my way of saying that maybe, just perhaps, when we think to ourselves and our situation, and are being honest when we tell others about the misfortune that befell us, how we lost our job when everything was going so well, for so long, I am beginning to think we tend to forget that every train will have run its course. This metaphor doesn't work because of the train, it's the train that works because of the metaphor. We didn't just lose our job because so-and-so simply had it out for us, or since they were your boss meaning it's their fault, not at all. It shouldn't be relegated to that simplistic interpretation, which remains at heart a selfish one. There's always a greater picture we aren't factoring all variables into. For example, perhaps someone higher up had ordered your boss to let you go; see what I mean? It's not worth taking even a tame guess as to what motivated anyone to do anything, because when you get right down to it, people are acting in a manner quite beyond their control, when you think about it long enough. Perhaps why it's been said to not judge, lest we be judged.
Why do we wake up each new morning and start yet another day all over again? The moral of this lesson remains simple and straightforward enough. Since this life we're all born into brings about calamity for everyone on occasion, every now and again, rendering each of us just waiting to see when our turn comes back up, the true test that lies before us yet, is how will each one of us deal with it? That's all that really matters when you get down to it, because since everything seems to revolve around the timing (and the timing of the timing, mind you) we can only feel a sort of terrified gratitude when it's our turn, to have the matter at hand having run its course, or as Tom Waits once alluded to, after our having loved something until the wheels fell off, as they must do and will do for every last one of us.
The subject of this essay has had very little to do with death, which itself remains another subject we're all bound to, altogether. No; in this case I am referring to and writing about life. It's life itself which exists as a much greater accumulation of the totality of eternity's essence, now coming back around again in a cumulative approach, for yet another spin along the circuit breaker of existence, which keeps the current moment going, on its celestial light-ride into and beyond infinity, for all we know. In other words, if there's anyone to blame whatsoever, I think it would behoove each and every individual one of us to realize that it should be relegated strictly to ourselves, who are the ones that often falter and fail to initiate the necessary action to pick ourselves up and out of the ditch we were knocked into, and accomplish the particular tasks and goals needed to get back up on our feet and carry on. It seems to me that the only ones in the world who qualify to receive any proper blame (if blame were to be handed out) should be every human being born into it, for not picking themselves back up and getting on with it. We've all stepped or rolled into this arena together, the global stage. The main difference being that we have done so, each and every last person in existence, at a different and unique sliver of time buried in the echelons of microsections discretely growing into macrocosms, eventually to reverberate with the fading echo of their song, our song, a symphony of echoes that diminishes forever until it may be faintly heard to rise again, in another time and place, increasing in volume by such gradual degrees that a sufficient passage of the eons of time again reach a crescendo of instrumental fury, and so on and so forth.
This has been my treatise on personal accountability, to take responsibility for ourselves as individuals and quit pointing the fingers at others we think are to blame for doing us wrong. There's a whole teeming, wild world burgeoning out there, chock full of natural disasters and chain lightning sparking wildfires, brimming and overflowing with predatory packs of wolves and men, both scheming to no end to do what it takes to feed themselves and their own families. We should take the time to think how lucky we are that we made it this far. That we survived a global pandemic just five years ago, and that just one of the things we all share in common, remains the fact that we're all currently alive during this supernatural moment in time, amid a grandiose universe we can barely begin to wrap our minds around, much less comprehend. That one common denominator I shouldn't have to remind anyone about remains the fact we are each and every single last one of us, defined as survivors.
If you made it this far, in life I mean, not just this article you're reading, it's because you are in control enough to have done so, and that can only mean one thing. It's up to us to take full responsibility for getting our lives back on track, instead of choosing to wallow in the depths of despair after blaming anyone else for getting us there. Each new day that allows the sun to rise up in the morning heralds another opportunity coming our way. Let's do our best to forgive those who wronged us, and take advantage of the time we still have, while we can, I always say. And may your road forward lead you into the unexpected surprises this miracle of a life has yet in store for all of us.
