Life As Performance Art 25

It is quite a balancing act, this living between two realities, the personal and the ontological. We are caught between a volcano and a blazing desert, it seems, the desert being our personal lives where we are often scrabbling to find or create meaning, and the volcano being that world around us and we never know what form it's going to erupt into, but we are not going to like it. Sometimes we end up living right on the volcano, where the most fertile soil can be cultivated for crops, the most fecund and dangerous place. Like any metaphor, this is going to have it's limits. I think what turns many of us into such grumpy old men, and women, is that when we get to a certain age we know we have not done a great job of straddling this difficult balance. We have, at best, realized but a fraction of our dreams, and in most cases we have not risen to our level of expectation. Or we realize, too late, how we've been duped. A materially prosperous life with that perfect lovely home, two cars, career, fat pension and investments, lovely spouse, perfect kids and even more perfect grandkids, has somehow stymied our spiritual and moral development as complete human beings. We have drunk the Kool Aid, lived drunk on it, and now we are waking up with the grandmother of all hangovers. We have bartered our lives to make sure we are living. I have never known any of those successes and I live very modestly in a tiny subsidized apartment, where I just might end up having to stay for the rest of my life. My possessions include around five hundred books, half of them in Spanish, my art, clothes, dishes, kitchen utensils, the odd ornament, and furniture. Nothing else. I have enough. I am not like the prosperous burghers leaving their lovely big houses to be rendered uninhabitable as the Ottawa River keeps overflowing its banks. I have never had that much to lose. I rather feel sorry for them, they have never known the reality of loss, and now they are finding out how temporary it all is. I have no family, I have a few friends, but none of the ballast that most Canadians of my age take as entitlement. I am not envious. I enjoy good health, I have meaningful employment, and most of all, I am blessed with a grateful heart. I am very strong on gratitude, but I think that gratitude only has a lot of power if we believe in God, and if it is he, the creator and sustainer of all, that we are directing our thanksgiving to, because it's just giving credit where it is due. There is nothing we can do to change the world except in our own small spheres of influence. But we cannot let the stupid venality of our leaders and the destruction that is being wreaked on our planet to prevent us from rejoicing, because there is plenty to rejoice over. And that is better than nothing.