The Business Of Caring

Reference material works for you.

Tonight, I've skimmed through my 1975 printing of the 1967 copyright of the BSA Handbook, reminding myself of the information I used to carry in my head, including surviving in harsh conditions, estimating the wind chill factor, identifying desert shrubs, finding fish, practicing water conservation and looking at star constellations.

I have books on stars and planets, edible wild plants, French idioms, Russian grammar/vocabulary, quotations, trees, house construction, American-style football, digital logic design, ...

And of course, the Internet, as close to an infinite source of reference material as it gets these days.

You, too, provide feedback and information that build the growing library of knowledge we carry in this moment.

The height, width and depth of knowledge you choose to use.

Physical sports demands your attention in the moment.

Knowledge is action, including muscle contraction and synaptic firing in the brain.  Nothing is static.  An unopened book or an unused muscle has potential.  Use one or the other or both.

Tonight, I step back from all that goes on in the world at this moment to focus on this side eddy called me in the river of life, a node in the web of you and the rest of the universe.

Active random meditation, letting the thoughts come and go however you imagine thoughts coming and going.

One person.  One clothes hanger holding up a shirt, boxer briefs, slacks, belt, socks and moccasins.  Coated with soap, shampoo and shaving cream residue.  Digesting lettuce, tomato, cabbage, carrots and soup stock.  Tasting toothpaste.  Smelling musty books and leather seatback.  Eyes making contact with "visible" wavelengths.  Fingers translating thoughts into e-words.  Ears ringing with tinnitus.  Gas gurgling in the gastrointestinal tract.

Backing down into one's core absence of self.  Peeling away layers of social strata.  Words losing meaning.  No longer interpreting three-dimensional sight clues.  One big blur of stimuli, cause and effect.  Detached from understanding.  No threads to grab onto.  No thoughts to complete.  Free of time within the confined space of the body that one no longer feels is separate from its environment.

We are part of the whole, everywhere, all the time.  If we practice the discipline of removing labels, we remove walls and build new bridges within our thoughts and with others around us.  Love and fear embrace, each feeding off the other.

Because we have labels to deal with on multiple levels of label stickiness and strength, identifying labels takes up part of the time we could spend removing labels.  Such is life.  But we can learn how to ignore labels and make them disappear.

The willingness to walk without fear into the open arena of hostility, love of life making you transparent and absent of labels.  I see this everyday.

Are you at peace with your thoughts?  Do you approach others without fear?

Peace is not the same as happiness but most often they are.  Peace without happiness is accepting labels that separate you from others.  Peace with happiness is love for all, knowing we are different but not separate.

I am imperfect.  I carry old labels within me that I accepted from others in previous moments of my life.

However, I look for these labels within my thoughts and figure out what they are so I can study their cause and remove them from me while storing my impressions of how they'll appear in others.  When I see these labels demonstrated by others, I ask them if they know they carry and display these labels.  I mainly use humour to make this point (my wife says I sometimes slip into a snobby attitude when pointing out labels in others, a leftover label in me from my smartass schoolboy days I haven't completely erased).

I remove labels from my behaviours but keep them in my thoughts so I can look around me and see how others are using these labels for personal gain.  There is always the danger of my reusing the labels or reinforcing others' use of these labels but such is the chance I take while working with my network of associates to move our species along.

Whatever I do, you do, too, because I am you and you are me.  Gender or age makes no difference.

Let's take the time to remove labels from ourselves that no longer make sense.  Some labels are harder to remove than others but the same dogged determination and discipline can remove labels they once applied.

I close my eyes for a few seconds and let the images of the world build back up in my thoughts again.  My meditation comes to an end.  Time to look at real-world problems and analyse them based on my new self minus a few labels that belong to the last moment of my life.

Every moment of my life is new so I choose to approach the next moment with a different me.  Different how?  A better understanding of my thoughts.  A bigger, denser, richer picture of the universe in front of me, all because of you and your new self minus a few old labels.

We have all the time in the world.  Let's not waste time worrying about how long it takes to get to know one another to help us remove out-of-date labels we've put on ourselves and on others.  Time is on our side, if we give ourselves the time and space to understand where we're coming from.

Patience and discipline, my friends, tossed in with humour and meditation.  Don't be in such a hurry just to repeat the same ol' slogans stamped on your mass-produced labels.  We might even figure out how to quit pointing our warring and profiteering machines at one another and move our species forward a little faster instead of taking out our aggressions on one another.

One step at a time, one step at a time.  We gotta get us looking up at the stars and building hope for populating the universe or we'll keep snapping at each other like caged animals.

Are you with me on that one?  See why my associates and I have bigger goals than world domination?  It's all about you and what goes on inside your thoughts.  Get the whole species thinking "yes" and we might just outlive our self-destructive habits.  Simulations show it's possible.  I'm willing to believe.  In fact, I will us to believe.

I know many of you won't and that's all right.  I'm willing to give you the chance to say "yes" and then leave behind those who said "no."  Free will.  The freedom to choose for oneself the alternatives of our species.

Your one chance to answer that question is coming up soon.  You've been shown the way to listen.  I've taught you the simple words to remember: Be Prepared.  Are you?