What to say, that might do justice to the experience of being alive? To notice, perhaps, that the well worn and oft-misused word, justice, is just ice, and that those two words more accurately represent the meaning of the one as we are likely to encounter it? Or that law is a word that signifies less a universal moral code than something to be feared, and which is wielded by a wealthy, unprincipled, powerful few? That prisons are a business, and health a commodity in a shrewd and heartlessly managed marketplace? Or to note, rather, that the birds are again busy building their nests, and that a maple forest is sprouting not fifteen feet from your window, for the simple reason that you did not rake and dispose of the leaves and the seeds? For these things too are part of a universal law, and are a rendering of poetic justice that nothing conceived by humans can quite approach. That children may be fed and play happily in the dirt is the only legitimate reason for anything as preposterous as government. Live by that principle, and no government is needed at all. Live with and for nature, rather than shunning its law. Know yourself in the aboriginal sense. Be the first human to have gazed at the stars, or into the eyes of another living being. When you think of being alive, see it not as a competitive race to a well defined end; see it as an experience only you can have. And while you are having it, understand that it is only real and valuable when you are willing to give what you learn, and when you welcome the same kind of giving from others. Die happily because you have truly lived, and because everything you are and have been will always be held in trust.
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Categories: Everything and Nothing
Tags: Experience, Giving, Government, Gratitude, Justice, Law, Life, Nature
William Michaelian 
Thanks, William. Found this in my inbox right close to another’s thoughts on Matthew 6 considering the birds of the air and the flowers in the field. “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” I’m often in a muddle over “these days,” but your opening question in itself is a help. All my best to you.
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And my best to you, Tom, with thanks.
We do have a way of complicating the simple and obvious. What better way to avoid looking into ourselves, and seeing how our daily actions are miniature versions of what’s happening in the world — the very things we’re most likely to complain and argue about? The present moment is all we have. Grasping, worrying, and planning for every imagined contingency takes us away from what’s real and beautiful of its own accord, in and around us. Of course old habits die hard, otherwise the passage you quote wouldn’t need to have been spoken.
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