A Rainy Day

It is a brooding, gray, rainy day. The house is quieter now than I can ever remember it. I feel older today. I’m tired. I’m pensive and anxious and I don’t know why. I’m feeling down today. It’s unusual for me to feel this way, still when it happens, I enjoy it. I enjoy feeling this way. Isn’t that odd? I’m usually feeling up, happy and healthy. I normally feel so healthy I don’t give my health a thought. I suppose most healthy people are like that. I am thankful that I am usually healthy, and painfully aware that many are not. So, I am happy and thankful that my ill-feeling today is not normal.

Today I feel half-sick and sad. I’m down. And, as strange as it sounds, it feels good to me to feel something else besides the way I normally feel. I wouldn’t want to feel sick; but this in-between feeling of half-sick is actually comforting. It reminds me, that I am mortal and time is not something that should be wasted. I waste a lot of time. I waste time waiting for things to happen, things to come, things to go, mail to come, and that sort of thing. Sometimes, I waste time like I had an endless supply of it. Today reminds me that I don’t and then again, maybe I have more time to waste than I think. That’s what I love about my mood today, it is fertile soil for thought. All I need is a little coffee to water the soil.

It occurred to me, in this morose mood of mine, that all diseases must begin as simple symptoms; maybe an ache here or there, maybe a twinge of pain; maybe just a tired, lethargic feeling – that one I can’t precisely describe. I think I would ignore most symptoms for awhile, especially if I had had the same symptoms before. I guess the people that run to the doctor at every ill feeling, are more in tune with their bodies than I – or maybe they’re just more afraid of dying than I. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to die. Although when I think about it, I imagine death is more for the living than the dead. The dead don’t really care if they are not alive, do you think? Besides if anyone ever reads this when I’m dead they’ll be wondering, won’t they?

I’ve often thought that before I was born, human history progressed just fine without me. I read about Shakespeare’s life. He lived long before I was born. I don’t actually know that there was a Shakespeare. I have to take people’s word for it. I don’t know that he really did all those things. I wasn’t around to see him do them. Someone wrote Hamlet. They said it was Shakespeare, but I wasn’t there to actually see him laboring over it.

I’ve read about the great conquests of Alexander The Great. And through the written history I can experience it. In my own way, which would certainly be different than yours. But I sure wasn’t on this earth when Alexander The Great was conquering and vanquishing his enemies.

I’m pretty sure that when I die the world will continue spinning ’round and ’round and history will be made without me. Then I wonder if I’ve always been here? Maybe a caveman; then maybe a slave; then perhaps I helped construct the great pyramids. Maybe a little later I was a Roman Centurion; then sailed on the Mayflower to begin a life adventure in a new world’ then a pioneer on a wagon train to the wild West. Maybe then I was a dough boy in WWI. If I was any of these before, I don’t remember it. And that intrigues me. It’s a good thing that I don’t remember being here before. It would be a complicated mess if all our different lives overlapped. After a few hundred centuries we’d be a mess of conflicting ideologies. We’d be bombarded by so many memories that our minds would be overcome and we wouldn’t be able to function. I think it’s good, that if we go around and around in cycles of lifetimes that we always start the next life with a clean slate. We can learn “new” things for the five-hundredth time, all over again and maybe learn it better this time around. If we don’t learn it well this time; we’ll try again next time. Eventually, we get it right – I think.

So, I guess I believe whatever is inside of us that makes “me” me, and “you” you; that energy, that awareness we feel, never dies. It just comes and goes in a never-ending cycle of life. Each time we’re born, we are born as a different person, and then only thing we have left from previous lifetimes it that sense of self. Who can say I’m not right? Maybe God is the animator and is that “me” or “you” inside us that lives and dies and lives and dies forever. Maybe there is just one glorious life and we all share a piece of it – you, me, the trees, the flowers, the animals. All life is the same when you get to the essence of it. Isn’t it? That spark of life that makes a tiger alive isn’t in a rock or other non-living thing. Where does the energy of life go when we die? It can’t be destroyed or created. It just is. It is and will be forever. God has no beginning and no ending. Maybe God is everything and everything is God?

I’m not espousing religiously – or questioning my beliefs. I’m not going off on a transcendental quest. It’s just me musing on a cold, dark, November day. I love drifting along with my thoughts as the rain pounds on the windows. Gray, dreary skies and the gloomy, slanted light of November make for great thinking. Sometimes it’s good to feel down and pensive. I wallow in it and enjoy it. I can even enjoy the feeling of being almost-but-not-quite-sick, a little. Feeling this way motivates me to contemplate my own mortality. That is not such a bad thing, after all.

I don’t take enough time to think about these kinds of things when I’m happy and feeling good – and going about my daily life, buzzing busily around as I normally do. I waste too much time most of the time I think. But maybe I have more time than I think I do? Maybe I have an eternity of it?

I don’t know what to think. I just know that today was a good day for it.