8/24/21

By Josh Rubin

Much of life is lived steering between rocks and hard places. It is starker for those whose choices are fewer. Like those who are choosing each day between the fear and doom of collapsing economies, corruption, and hunger on the one hand; and the long journey roll of the dice that may end in shattered families or as bones drying in a desert across a muddy river.

But I would like to spare a thought for those of us who from a far more secure perch must decide each day when to look at the heart-wrenching picture presented in the paragraph above, and when to let our tears dry, if only so that we may see more clearly. And if I may add a third rock to complicate navigation, I would add that cliff that we all are moving towards, the one that ends life, and for my contemporaries and myself, generates a special urgency whenever the curtain of delusion of eternal life is drawn back.

In other words, even for the privileged, life will end, and the end is in sight. I am not the only one thinking about this, I sense. I have noticed in the social stream of devoted activists lately portraits of flowers and garden harvests. And I have visited lands of great poverty and suffering and returned with memories of babies in mothers’ arms, and bits of craft and art that carry the scent of eternity.

No answers here. How much comfort should we take for ourselves as our twisting planet careens and wobbles toward disaster? How much of our waning mornings should be surrendered to pain and how much to gratitude for the brief moments left? And where, among the ominous rocks we turn over in search of wriggling life, do we find the strength to hope, and to work?