Reflections on a rainy day.

The rain is coming down hard as I sit in a comfortable chair, relaxed after a morning of pickleball. I marinate in the contentment and gratitude that always overwhelms me of late and I find myself in a quiet reflective mood. I find it interesting that people get so excited about things that are so unimportant. Politics, religion, the past and the future are largely irrelevant. What do these things matter to us here and now, today, in this moment. What control do we actually have over any of these events?

Just how important are we? I recently read about a 9000 year old Stonehenge type structure at the bottom of lake Michigan, baffling, and then there's the 11,000 year old Neolithic site called Göbekli Tepe, and the Wonderwerk cave in South Africa showing signs of human habitation 1.8 million years ago. What do we know about these people? What can we know about these people? And I understand that we will be these people someday. What will our world look like in 10,000 years, what signs will be left of us? How about 100,000 years? I can just imagine whatever civilization exists in the far future, whether it be the cockroaches or the robots or some form of evolutionary humanity sifting through remnants of our old buildings, subways and structures wondering what the hell we were all about.

It seems to me we are an evolutionary blip in the mind and flow of the universe, here to experience the now. Why get caught up in self importance and meaningless current conditions and events, especially ones we have no control over. I just want to enjoy now, this moment, the sound of the rain, the gentle buzz of my body after a workout and reflect on the people that are important to me, my granddaughter and the beauty I see around me. And there is great beauty in this world. So many people focus on the bad while they miss the truly beautiful. When we take step back, stop focusing on imagined problems and what ifs, beauty can be found all around us, even in the opportunity for resilience found in sadness and tragedy. We need to understand it's all temporary and meaningless in the big picture. It’s all just an experience of richness in the grand tapestry of life.