A day in the park

In my last post I remarked how surprisingly ten years seems to have passed by so very quickly but then of course perhaps it has not really been that quick! I think back easily to the day that Garth messaged me to say he'd opened his 'ED' form and I should come along and join. In my recall of that event, I remember it clearly as if it had only happened yesterday. A fact I shall thank providence for since a few other memories seem to have absconded and have just left muddy imprints and fading after-images scattered around the walls of my mind where I'm reasonably sure those memories used to reside.
Oh yes, lots of things have happened in the three thousand, six hundred days plus that came and went after his forums grand opening.
Sumomo was a day short of her first birthday back then but now she is eleven and as I write this I watch her and Rikochan play together with their friends and other children here in the park.
It is comforting in a way to feel a part of the circle of life, this cycle of events playing over and over again come each generation. I played here in this very same park with my friends when I too was just a child. Mother would sit on the bench and she watched over us from behind her book. One day, perhaps twenty years from now my angels will sit here and watch their own children play and they may even consider the very same cycles of life.
I smile at a comforting imagining as I listen to John Dowland's 'Lachrimae' on my headphones, a song composed over 400 years ago. 
Thoughts and music like this make me think the oddest of things. Do we think we’re choosing things for ourselves yet in fact we may not be choosing anything at all. It could be that everything's already been decided in advance and we only think we’re making choices or more likely we believe it. Free will may be an illusion and if it were so and we knew it were so wouldn't it all grow so very dark? Perhaps ignorance is bliss on this occasion and I will conveniently forget to ask the question of who actually decided it all, if indeed it has been decided beforehand.
I love my angels and I love Hitomi and perhaps if we have at least one love in our lives and even if whom we love has also been decided by these fates, as long as we do love then that surely at least shines a little light in that darkness.
I suppose future knowledge nothing like me stopping typing for a moment and of me looking up from my laptop and watching the children run around and play their games. Then suddenly I think to myself that the smallest girl of the group is going to fall down any moment now. I see them all running and playing and the little one, who is perhaps five, tries all the more harder to keep up with the older children and in doing so she is running far too fast than she can actually manage and maintain her balance and ... over she goes. Luckily she's in the grass and her landing is not as bad as if she were on the pathways. As the others race back to help her up I think to myself, 'I knew it was going to happen!' But it wasn't really a prediction of a future event was it? Not like a certain card reader who appeared to do for me a few years ago. No! It was more a case of predicting a likely outcome of something that's happened to all of us in similar circumstances and we've seen often repeated time after time. I could see at once as the excitement of the game mounted and she tried all the more harder she was losing her balance. I am now gratified that I used the word 'circles' in my blog post opening.
People of earlier cycles listened to the music I listen to now and they see the same sun up in the sky. Perhaps their perceptions were a little more different than the people of my world in my 'now'. Imagine back when 'Lachrimae' first danced across the strings of a new lute. Of course I hear it as a quality mp3 rendition using the instruments of the day and I can hear it any time I wish whereas they couldn’t hear proper performances of music anytime they liked, it was always something special. It was a much crueler world back then, a world much more brutal where not many lived to old age and the child mortality rate was high because of malnutrition and epidemics. They may have had a closeness to nature and richer spirits because of it, our modern would and creature comforts could possibly be dulling our perceptions. We have leisure time now, a time to play and a time to appreciate. A time of learning and does such knowledge make us grateful?
There is still so much pain in the world and so much ignorance as we hold on to past truths.

I think people want more from life and they hope for more from life and they would quite easily with a romantic notion dispel the boring, bland routines of which is life for the many. This life becomes something we eagerly turn our backs upon as we desire such escapes. Eagerly we read our novels and we watch the dramas on TV and how easily we suspend belief in the theaters with the latest blockbuster. We want more! We create our poetry and myth and monsters. We create stories to account for missing information and we dream up scenarios that greatly embellish the mandatory mundane.

Next to me is a wall. It is an ordinary wall like many of the walls you have seen. This one separates the park I am in from the traffic on the streets. It is a necessary wall that creates a border and defines a boundary and keeps the angels, their friends, me and the other mothers in the park distinctly detached from the cars and trucks speeding along Platinum street.
We could paint that wall, beautifying it and make it ever so pretty. We could decorate it with ornamental lights and built in benches and attach artistic sculptures. We could attach a metal plate announcing the fact that it was built in honor of someone quite special and we could have another equally famous person come and unveil it. We could recount fantastic, interesting and emotionally charged stories of lovers that met here by the wall and as such we may imbibe a sense of romance and wonderment by association.
But it is just a wall and and we live just a life in this, our cycle. Life is something that we perhaps know as equally ordinary as this wall and yet still we want to make it special and fantastic. We add tales and spice it up with things from out of the ordinary and things fantastic. Life I think is really quite simple and yet there are those who 'simply' want to make it more complicated.