Tired: The feelings of yesterday.

Seven sombre minutes past three has me staring at the ceiling and thinking if I have the strength left to drag my tired body from my bed towards the kitchen for the desired warm milk, that one of the several nagging voices in my already over-crowded head kindly informs me is the solution to find that elusive sleep and stop me from trying to dream with my eyes open. The fatigue and the aches of the previous day don't allow me to dream with open eyes and act as an anchor upon my imagination so even that fails me. I arise.

From my balcony window I look up at the moon and as the chocolate milk spreads a comforting warmth across my frame I could imagine that somewhere distant and out past the lights of the city would be another pair of eyes looking out upon the same moon. In seeing it, although we are apart, we are together.
Oh for wishes and dreams. All of us want things and we wake each morning with a list of wishes and we may spend some time on trying to make some of those wishes come true. I wonder that just because we want them to come true, life goes on without them and that means that we don't really need them to be happy. I remind myself to be thankful for what I do have.

Perhaps you may think that it's easy for me to say such things when I talk from a position where I appear to have all that I need. Appearances are just that, they don't highlight the things that I don't have and if you knew me better you'd know that there were terrible losses that I have suffered and the worst of times I have experienced. Those bad things may not be the same as your bad things and my good times may not be the same as your good times, but collectively they are the balance of experiences within our lives. I have spoken of the bad in times past but now I try to see the good in my life and cling to those things as if they were the flotation devices in a sea of potential bad tidings. I don't ignore the bad things as an ostrich with his head in the sand, I just deal with them as best I can and hope they are small bad things and spaced well apart and don't arrive each day so I am not pulled under.



I sat and browsed through some of my old photos and laughed not only at the great memories they trigger in my mind, but also at my hair or the clothes I'm wearing. The older the pictures are the more out-dated in a fashion sense they become. I think that you too have photos of yourself that may make you wince a little as you see within them what you used to think was a wicked style. Hey it was great at the time, but we tend to view the past from the perspective of today and that's where we make many mistakes. Imagine then that not only our hairstyle and our clothes look out of place in those old photos (because of today's perspective) but also the things we said, the things we did and perhaps even the things we believed.
Today I can freely say that the Earth spins around the sun and you will say, "Yes! So what?", but when Galileo first proposed this it almost cost him his life. From our wonderful vantage point of today we can look back on many of our historic eras and laugh almost incredulously at the beliefs they held back then.

So my point here is that in ten years time I may look at photos of me today and laugh at my hair and laugh at my fashion sense since neither will probably match the fashions of 2018 and more to the point, what will people from 300 years hence find strange about some of the beliefs that we hold dear today? We are living in times were we see bad politics and religious misconceptions driving people to do such evil things and we say we have come from a barbaric past. Yet 300 years hence will our time be pointed out as the age of enlightenment? I doubt it! Who dares say that our era is the first era where everything is correct and righteous are the things we believe. We, like those before us, live in an age that judges all that is past and rarely consider what could be, we are programmed for the here and now and occasionally look back with the feeling of that is what we came from. The future is as yet unborn and it's only our hopes that we place there even if we 'plan for the future'.

We have things in our minds that we won't say out loud so others can hear us and in years past you were thought of as maladjusted if you thought things that you could not say out loud then. If I told you that people from Madagascar were ten feet tall you will dismiss me as crazy. If I told you that many groups of Muslims were plotting the overthrow of Christianity, you might consider my words for a moment and then think I'm a little extreme but perhaps not unreasonably so and if I told you that America brought down their own buildings in New York then you will start calling my words insulting and a disgrace to those that lost their lives and anything that will dismiss what I say with elements of guilt towards me for daring to say them. This clearly shows that statements I make that might be believed are the ones that make people nervous and upset. The ones that offer the biggest threat to the mass beliefs of others. So it was for Galileo. The Church at the time didn't want people thinking out reasonable thoughts, they wanted the ignorance since it reinforced the conformity to dogma. If there's something we cannot say, it's a possibility we want to keep it hidden ourselves or more usually because some group doesn't want us to.

Those labels that were applied to our ancestors such as blasphemy and heretic and sacrilege were the ones that got people killed. then later in the reformist times we have indecent and unpatriotic and improper and one we hear from the USA is un-American. What about labels such as defeatist or racist or derisive or terrorist or politically insensitive? These are labels closer to our time and the labels we use today. These are perhaps the points that our descendant 300 years in the future will laugh at us about or wonder how we lived in the world with such crazy beliefs and fears.

There are changes like in science and the advancement of knowledge we can say we are right and they were wrong. But socially, who can say? Our ancestor's believed at the time what was the right thing to believe just as we today believe what we think is the right thing. This does not make our generation 'smarter' than our great great great great great great grandfathers. They just believed in ideas that were reasonable at the time, as do we in our time.

Fashions change and beliefs change and I ramble on when I'm tired, but I still pull my face looking at what was cool just a few years past. I can say things today and as long as no one kills me for saying them or mistakes me for the relative of Salmon Rushdie, I can grow and I can learn and I may change my mind about things in a few years time. I can also lose my unfashionable clothes, change my hair and hide the photos of terrible embarrassment.



Rina, my young brother's girlfriend, has decided that she wants the 'pitter-patter' of small feet treading in her apartment next door and so has invested in a small puppy that she has named Sally. She introduced me to her in the laundry room while we were washing the restaurant linens and she really is adorable. Even though I'm a cat lover and my cat strolls out on the balcony and up to the roof garden like she is the owner, I wonder what she will think of the new family addition who will also consider those places as her territory. Dogs are the only other creature on Earth I think that makes an alliance with humans.





Cat's look down on us and perhaps see us as a warm furniture and dogs look up to us.
Crocodiles consider us a menu item and horses think we are crazy and they tolerate us.
OK I'm laughing with those thoughts, I don't even know if animals could think such things. But have you noticed that dogs accept you as you are and never pass critic? I shall make an active study of dogs and especially Sally since I can learn a lot from her like obedience, loyalty and turning around several times before I lie down to sleep.

Lit a candle for Momma today and spent an hour in quiet prayer with her. She loves to hear all the news.