Life As Performance art 182

"Explanations tend to ruin it for me, and there is no easy-out for the intellectually lazy like the conspiracy theory. So much that happens in the world is random, and life itself is extremely random and part of living well is in being able to embrace the complexity, and the mystery and to celebrate paradox. Even though I believe there is a divine purpose to life and existence, that purpose is so utterly complex, deep and vast that there is no point in trying to get our feeble little minds around it. Better to try to understand, figure out and evaluate, then, knowing that once again that we are never going to know a lot more than nothing, to go on our way rejoicing in our smallness as we find our way through this vast and ultimately unknowable universe. I also think that if we seek to value, appreciate, love and care for others and for the beauty of the nature that we are part of, then that will bring us much further down the road to understanding anything of value." This is my answer last night to a question that was sent to me from Quora, as to whether or not I believe in conspiracy theories. I find that thinking to be so rooted and shrouded in the shadows of fear that I don't even for a moment want to entertain that kind of thinking. Life is way too short for that. If we are always so frightened and perpetually trying to find and identify backrooms and secret boardrooms and clandestine meeting places for the wealthy, the powerful, and other noxious personajes from where they plot and plan their global dominance and to ensure the marginalization and destruction of the rest of us, well, why even leave your room or your parents' basement or what ever rock, cave or crypt where you have chosen to conceal yourself and wait everything out till its all over and the earth is finally nothing more than a burnt out cinder hurling through the cosmos? Every day that we wake up we are also going to be presented with the choice as to how we are going to meet that day and all the challenges the new day will be bringing us. This morning on the radio I heard an interview with an elderly Japanese woman who had survived the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War, when mass fear, racism and intolerance marginalized everyone in this country that wasn't a white English-speaking Canadian with British roots. She said that she refused to be bitter, and in her childhood innocently embraced the beauty and adventure of her family's new surroundings living in a ghost town in the BC wilderness. She said that her parents refused to dwell on the many negatives of their experience: the racism, the exclusion, the being herded like animals and prisoners into an isolated community, the absolute legislated hate and fear that was destroying their lives and community. She simply refuses, to this day, though now eighty or older, to be bitter. This is not to justify living in states of denial, because we certainly have to face and speak of things as we are. But if we choose to remain bitter and angry, then we have defrauded ourselves of the beauty and joy that is also our inheritance as human beings, as children of God (whether we believe or not) and as citizens of the universe. Hate. fear and bitterness make us miserable, small, and disabled. Joy, love and gratitude liberate us and make us grow into the people we are destined to be.