I don’t say it often enough, but I am truly filled with gratitude for the wonderful people who surround me. I receive support, credit, and love far beyond what I could ever deserve. That inspires me to be more like you imagine I might be, and less like I might be otherwise. I know some of the most kind, loving, smart, compassionate, strong people in the world … and I’m amazed that you let me into your company.
Today, I woke up. I’m whole and I’m healthy. I have, relative to most people in the world, a life of leisure and relaxation. I’ve had opportunities without measure, and I really can’t take personal credit for much of that success except the most recent and superficial decisions.
Life sometimes seems like a game of “draw” poker where you are dealt 7 cards and you can trade in perhaps one or two of them through the whole game. Sure, you want to pick wisely with the choices that you have … but those choices are a small piece of the overall picture painted by chance, karma, or fate.
Life is short … and also long. You never know whether this one day, this meal, this moment of sitting quietly with a loved one will be the last of its kind. Facing that uncertainty honestly, neither with moping despondence nor desperate attachment … finding a way to simply be grateful for another day of waking up and getting to see how cool the world is: That’s where it’s at.
The life of man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to see their passionless splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjugation, but we absorb it and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things — this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship. And this liberation is effected by the contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of time.
United with his fellow men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, toward a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need — of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours wias the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.
Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow fall, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyeilding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.
From “A free man’s worship” by Bertrand Russell – atheist, skeptic, and freethinker.
Happy birthday (yesterday), mom. I miss you.
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