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Friday, August 28, 2020
 
 
Hakuna matata in evidence on every corner in my world.
 
As is evidence that many apparently smart people are really so stupid, they wouldn’t be funny in a stupidity documentary.
 
Who, me, worry? 
 
Poppycock, bull feathers!
 
Seasons and cycles of life as we know them manifest everywhere on this planet throughout seasons, reasons, and birth-to-death cycles, in every plant and critter.
 
I’ve been witnessing a coyote teach her pup to stalk rabbits and gophers, regularly get to see osprey youngsters taking flight-tests, mingled with frequent sightings of old folks like me – making our way along trails. Walkers, runners, and cyclists.
 
Because that peaceful looking park is hardly friendly or safe; petri dish for the cycle of life – not dog-eat-dog, but certainly coyote-eat-rabbit, brutal as raptors murder their food too (yes, we butcher cattle – but we have someone do it for us – the meat cutter wraps it for the store shelf).  That apparently tranquil park collides harshly with its neighbouring environs. Waving grass and trees border on the dust whirl and exhaust called traffic – a single radio plays a tune while the internet plays 10,000 all at once – there must be peace and silence somewhere.
 
A long walk without a note pad challenges the memory – to make note of things, in the hope of recalling them later. Invariably the ones I remember aren’t so consequential, and the ones that I forget; well, we’ll never know.
 
Thrashing through the to-do list, the triage – important task of separating wheat from chaff, is one of the best by-products of the early morning walk.
 
Sure, it’s great to watch that coyote pup in training stalking prey, or the osprey youngsters testing out their wings – the growing season is full throttle, but the coming of cooler shorter days is drawing near …
 
We live in our own shoes – the accumulated life of deeds and learning, of misdeeds and failures to learn too – and we function, as specs on the earth, insignificant in the grande-scheme of things. Yet, we’ve made ourselves believe we are essential, and it matters that we are worth paying attention to by some cadre of followers, believers, friends, and systems of organizations and governing bodies.
 
Freedom?
 
No worries?
 
The cycle of life?
 
We should all be dreamers, but we are required by necessity and for survival, to be cynics – harsh mean critical cynics. We should not go quietly into the night. We should yell and pound our chests and stomp our feet. We are well-lubricated gears in an elaborate monument to societal engineering.
 
The choices we all make are those of compliance or acts of defiance. If we are silent, we will be paved over by the next steamroller or bully. If we stand up, stand out, or have a bullhorn we are just as likely to be paved over by progress and inexorable actions of 7.5 billion similar specs of dust on this plant, more contented to be part of an extensive collection of like-minded non-thinkers, just go along – no worries.
 
I worry.
 
I worry a lot.
 
Worrying about ourselves for ourselves is a time-wasting activity of youth – and I can attest to having wasted more of it than most. I don’t fear for my children, and I don’t worry for my grandchildren because they are so well parented.
 
I worry about the noise that overwhelms the efforts of good people to do good things, I worry about individuals whose needs and issues are relegated to the recycle bin of complaints in the bureaucracy du jour – because of the few things not handled by a program, algorithm or sensor – those are handled by people. Too often handled by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, and/or care that it might be important to anyone.
 
You might wonder if I’ve been reading an essential treatise on the machinations of our society’s structure?
 
No, I’ve been reading the last six months of board meeting minutes for my condo association board – now I want to poke my eyes out with a meat fork at the stupidity and waste on minutia simply to give people something to do and debate.
 
No worries?
 
We might want to worry a little bit more than we do.



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