Blog Note

For: 1lifes marbles
When I woke up this morning my head was filled up and roaring down the road. It’s spring 2010 and I’m staring at things personally I would have never thought possible when I was in my 20’s. I’m seeing things coming to fruition, in my society and country, which I have feared. Seeing them as probabilities since my 40’s and did nothing but grumble and complain (two very ugly marbles). In keeping with my analogy of marbles, there are a multitude of marbles involved, in both my personal bag and that of my country, that have brought myself and country to their respective situations. The marbles involved in both are: Love, Ethics, Morality, Honesty, Commitment, Trust and most of all Prayer. There may be some more but if I think of them I’ll add them to the mix as we go.
Much as our bodies are made up of cells and the health of our body is determined by the health of the individual cells as they combine together. The health of a society is made up and determined by the health, actions and perceptions of the people in the society as a group. If the marbles of Love, Ethics, Morality, Honesty, Commitment, Trust are not polished and cared for bad things can happen. Most generally these marbles become cracked, tarnished and chipped away because we continue to go through time on a series of slippery slopes, thinking “just this once won’t hurt or matter in the overall theme of things”. Wrrrrooooong! Just as the body can become increasingly ill through lack of proper nourishment, ingestion of wrong foods and putting it in position to accept illness from other people, our society or Nation can react and become ill for the same reasons. Fortunately, or not depending on what you believe, when we don’t know how to fix our circumstance we can use the bigger marble (PRAYER) to Hope things can be repaired. The more Faith and Intensity of the faith, the more likely you are to attain results and answers.
Personally: It’s much easier for me to look back in the face of time to see what happened to my marbles and why things are, and to some extent the what and why of today. With the passage of time, to help clarify the importance of decisions made and the ripple effect of acting out those decisions, we can learn. If it’s too late in the game to really affect our own circumstance we can perhaps help someone else. If I have a huge regret in this life it is not doing something about all the other things I wish I had done differently.
To find one’s self in the last few years of life without the means to care for the physical needs of myself and my wife is a devastating situation to say the least. Lacking the health of body I would like to have, in order to put up the good fight to fix things, is equally frustrating. Believe me when I say, even if I were someone who did not believe in God, I would be praying.
There have been so many junctions, in my seven decades, I might have taken different turns for better results. The beauty of retrospect is that we can only surmise what the outcome may have been. That view is only helpful if a similar situation occurs again in our life. The fact is that when we make a choice to act, it is the best we can do at that particular time. If we knew better we would do better. Most of our decisions are based on what we really believe to be true not on what we think might be true. Occasionally we act on false thinking, hoping for results that will work out.
We can’t and don’t always act on fact as we know it, sometimes when we act on what we think maybe possible, great things can happen. If mankind didn’t have the ability to use his imagination there are a lot of good things the world would never have known. That is a fact that keeps adding to our pile of mistakes as well as our heap of rewards. I believe God made us in his image and to this day we as human beings try to create new things. I believe that God must be a curious god, even though I was taught that He was omniscient. I believe that, at times, when He looks upon mankind he has to say,”Self what was I thinking”. The fact that He gave man a free will can be viewed as a blessing or as a curse, but that’s how he made us. Free will was a gift allowing us all the ability to be surprised by the outcome of our choices.
My results have been very mixed throughout my life. Retrospectively, I have found that the worst were caused by selfishness and a desire for immediate gratification, two more damaging marble wreckers. These two wreckers have led to circumstance that have cursed and blessed at the same time. These traits are very difficult to overcome if they are not acknowledged and one should use them as a filter in making decisions. The blessings from them are quite accidental and occasional while the curse of them is general and without fail will occur in some form or another. The curse of these bad guys, in my life, took the forms of hurting people I love or loved, the loss of relationships with friends and family, the loss of self respect and the respect of others. They have caused me to lie, cheat, and steal in one form or another and to move away from being who I wanted to be as a person. These traits are erosive to one’s life course and should be watched for with absolute diligence. Vice’s very seldom are solitary in one’s life. We make the mistake of thinking a little mis-deed won’t hurt anything or anyone, but they do and almost always lead to forcing one bad choice after another in terms of good ethics and standards. The correction of these situations are most generally going to cause you a lot of pain, and that is inevitable when you finally see the folly of your actions. In my life I have lost contact and relationship with family, children primarily, whom I still love but don’t have the energy to reach out to. I am, I guess relying on the hope that the truths kept hidden will be shown to all in the afterlife, another one of those belief structure deals base in faith and hope.