Life and Life

 With all the highly publicized killings going on in Gaza/Israel and in the Ukraine, I wondered about some recent talks officialdom has been holding about victim compensation. Like, if we kill 500 innocent civilians, including children, how much should we compensate the country?

So, what is human life worth? Is each life worth the cost of a case of beer?  Hmmm, tough one.

And then, after I arise early each morning, I trod downstairs and go outside to take a picture of the morning sunrise. And I accompany my picture, being posted on Facebook with, “Morning lovely. Be kind. Peace bro.” And then again, in the evening, as the sun commits itself to setting, I post another picture and write, “OK, It’s Time to Wine On. So Do It.”

But in between, an entire day of personal steps and events occurs. I look out the window and observe a bird at one of our feeders. Or our mailman stops by to drop off our daily mail and we chat briefly about his day and the events of that day.

And at some stage, I shove a toothbrush into my mouth and clean my teeth. But only after consuming some freshly brewed espresso, and a sliced mango. Or I go out into the garden with some clippers and snip off some unwanted plants in the garden.

Or I sit with a glass of wine, as we munch on some dinner while watching a British mystery, or comedy on our TV. And then, at some stage, we take off our night dress and climb into bed, and turn off the lights, as we both try to engage in that thing called Sleep.

See these are all little signs that we are not a case of beer, or some other commodity one may purchase at the corner store. We are living creatures. We breathe, we laugh, and sometimes we cry. And we think.  Yeah, that thinking thing. Something comes across your consciousness that today is December 7^th, and that springs a memory of that fateful day, December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day. Yeah, we’re really old, so we have an actual memory locked inside our heads.

Life is really a series of large and small memory snippets. We do things, or observe things and they are then tucked away into our brains.  See that doesn’t happen to a case of beer. Humans and really all other living creatures are memory banks. So, when we decide to kill off a bunch of humans of varying ages, we are eliminating those memory banks. And the young ones especially are deprived of all those creative acts and that slowly building memory bank filled with good and bad images.  And we, the world at large are also deprived of the acts those living creatures might have created. As we shoot or bomb that 3-year old, maybe we are killing the next Van Gogh, or Shakespeare, and we will never get to understand what our act of killing actually accomplished.

Killing is a truly mindless act, because if we thought about the act, it would become near to impossible to carry out.  In Gaza, folks who identify with Hamas seem not to mind killing folks, as long as those folks are Israeli. See, they don’t care that they are stealing future life events from people who identify as Israeli. And so, they also, without proper understanding, create within those same Israelis the same sense of armor around the brains that will allow Israelis to do the same thing to Hamas humans.

But it isn’t just in Gaza. Some idiot in Nevada, followed on the heels of another idiot in Texas, or was it somewhere else in America (so many shootings, so little time), managed to shoot innocent humans who had done nothing except wander into the wrong place at the wrong time.  See, with guns at their easy disposal, angry humans continue to cut off the future lives of other humans, who will then no longer experience watching a sunrise or a glorious sunset.

Killing is so final and eliminates hundreds, even thousands of gestures of love.  Life is really quite amazing. I am now in my 88^th year of that thing we call life.  And I have thousands of tiny events registered within my brain. Event images embedded within me that might have gone unnoticed had I died earlier.  I may die, any day now. Who knows? But I also may live another set of days and weeks and even years, creating and observing small and large things that others in the world may also observe.

Why can we not commit to peace and love?  Why can we ban books but not guns? Amazing really.

Well friends, continue to think and try to observe life all around you. Think about what happens to you today, and think, “I am grateful for the good things in my life”.  Try to be happy. But at least, try to BE. And do your best to allow that person next to you also BE.