About The Wonderful World
Post 966:
I was listening to a song the other day with a refrain about how wonderful the world is. That’s nice for a song, but it’s sort of presumptuous. If you’re lucky enough to sit around singing songs and not fishing in the choppy arctic or collecting unemployment because of outsourcing or doing that job for nickels in the place where they outsourced the job, then yeah, I guess the world is wonderful.
Okay, I just went negative there. And I’m not right. Not necessarily. I too am presumptuous. I have no reason to think that the person in the arctic doesn’t look on the world as a wonderful place. Maybe he’s singing while freezing balls on the deck of some death ship. Who am I to say how interesting that guy’s life is?
Nobody.
But I am somebody. Pretty sure, anyway. What I think is that the world is pretty wonderful if you stay real. What do I mean? I’ll give it a go whilst being brief. This will be challenging.
If you look at the world as a giant thing with a billion moving parts and a hundred billion moving thoughts it’s too much to characterize, one way or another. Call it crap. Call it wonderful. You’ll be wrong and right every time. That’s not helpful. Therefore precision is a matter of magnification.
What’s keeping it real? You’re real, at least Descartes “thought” so. I tend to agree. So start there and work outward slowly. You got a shot at life, and that’s pretty wonderful. Then there’s your friends and family. They’re going to be complicated and messy and annoying and hopefully make you laugh and hopefully you do a little bit to contribute. There’s your work community and faith community or maybe your bowling league or whatever.
Just that right there is a wonderful world. If you actually took actual interest in yourself and your weird brother Bill and the shifty guy down the hall at work and Helen from the bowling league, you’d have enough wonder in your life to occupy your day and then some. That’s a whole universe of things to do. To wonder at. And you didn’t have to look at your phone once.
Wonderful doesn’t mean happy time all the time. That gets old, anyway. If you’re anything all the time, including happy, the wonder goes away. You need variation. Undulations. Oscillations. All the ations.
Wonderful can mean great and marvelous, but I tend to take the secondary definition, which should be the primary definition: Of a sort or that which causes or arouses wonder.
I can’t go three steps without wondering what someone is doing or thinking as they pass me on my street, and I’m not even that curious. There’s a lot out there, and you don’t have to go too far. Check it out for yourself. There’s big things afoot. It’s sort of wonderful. Cheers and see you after.
