Kilts and Tri-Corner Hats

Yesterday, I meditated. I sat almost all day and let the sounds and motions of other humans pass through or around me. I was.

I know I do not exist so why do I continue to use "I"?

I read books and listen to those wiser and more learned than I inform me, instruct me, teach me that individuality is a myth or illusion. Yet they put their names on their books or lectures. They eat. They do not deny the privileges extended to them by others. They are not perfectly inert. They are, after all, social animals, too.

Last week, I participated in many human social functions, including lunches provided to the less fortunate such as the poor, the elderly, the mentally challenged and/or a combination of those. I watched people in marketplaces give goods or services without compensation. I heard people make unstated comments about others, complimentary and contradictory.

My ancestors occupied a few islands in the north Atlantic Ocean for millennia and then crossed the ocean to spread out across sparsely populated lands of North America. Now, part of their history is relegated to the dusty basement display cases of the Scottish Tartans Museum in Franklin, NC. Now, opportunists in the guise of other ancestral bloodlines move across this continent, writing their own history, perhaps less warlike than mine.

Now that I know I do not exist and that "not me" descended from humans living near the western shores of the European continent, what's next? When enlightenment brightens every corner of the rooms of one's thoughts, revealing all the hidden nooks and crannies, doing away with the secretiveness and showing you who you really are, what then?

Questions with no answers within reach of the wandering wonderer, who chews his fingernails in worried expectation of an answer.

I had notes to share from my pocket Moleskine journal, chronicling where my wife and I stopped to eat, shop or talk in the past few days, but for some reason I don't feel like rewriting any of them in this blog except this:

• The intersection of age-related interests/activities and pop/zeitgeist ones, that defines our lives, and distinguishes us from our forebears and peers. Of course, we know what we do only matters to other humans, of whom I've had my fill, tired of pretending to support everyone else's theory of the universe. I have no offspring to add to the burgeoning population and thus no reason to force my view of life on others -- why should I hang out with those who've reproduced except to laugh at the diversity of human opinions? Just want to think and write for myself which may or may not happen to appeal to a subset of a few billion humans who read blogs.
• I have no more to discover -- my life has been the refinement of my survival/coping mechanisms, repeating the general thoughts and activities of billions of others who've lived in the past few thousand years.

Words do not prop me up today. I see nothing new, nothing worth reporting. With no children of my own to care for, I am left to wonder why I exist as a socially supportive being when my contribution to the species is non-reproductive. My thoughts drift into no-man's land. Time to end this blog entry. Have to remind myself that being physically tired is not the same as being tired of writing and living (or is that "living and writing"?).