What do you see when you examine your own mortality?

I recently received news that my Brother-in-law has bladder cancer and I have spent the last couple of days contemplating my life and my own mortality. I hate that – I should not need news like that to force me to do it. I try very hard to examine myself on a daily basis but sometimes my hectic life gets in the way and that pisses me off. I am going to vow, again, to myself, not to let that happen again. I spoke with my Brother the day after the news and the day before the meeting with the oncologist and was surprised at what good spirits he was in. I have never faced any news like that but I hope if I get that news that I do not crumble into the fetal position in my bathtub and start sucking on my thumb, who knows it could happen. (I did steal that line from my brother) Bride and I have talked a lot about Brother Bill and our mortality and what we believe in or not believe in since first hearing the news.

Bride said the first thing she did was pray and I asked her why. She told me that it seemed the right thing to do. We then started talking about our belief in God, she is not sure if she believes and I consider myself a spiritual seeker so that did not get us anywhere. So that got us to talking about why is it that when news like that comes our first thought is to pray? We talked about religion and the role it plays in our lives, from early childhood through until today. She was raised Catholic, schooling and all and I was raised Baptist – how did we get together, right? Anyway we have very different backgrounds in that regard but neither of us is overly religious so it has never created any issues for us. Now she is more Agnostic than Atheist and less Catholic and I consider myself as somewhat the same. I am not sure what that means exactly but I guess it means I am somewhat Agnostic and have Atheistic tendencies.

Spiritual seeker – my ambling through life has lead me down, and back in some cases, many different paths. Some were good, others not so much, some were long road trips and some were brief incursions. I have learned some things that were beneficial to me and I learned things that were not so helpful. I have learned through example and study and I have learned by observing bad examples. I have learned from examining the motives of teachers who had their own agendas. I have found that we need to be observing and learning all the time and have found I learn more when I least expect to be learning something – the AH HA moments. I guess I am wary of teachers and when learning, in an organized way, from them I think I put up a knee wall and place a jaundiced eye on the material. No matter the source of the information we each must examine and reconcile this new information with what and who we are, without that what does it really mean – blind faith I think.

There has been one constant on my journey and that is most folks have some hypocrisy in them, and yes I place myself at the top of that list. You might think, from that statement that I am somewhat jaded wouldn’t ya. It is not meant that way and I do not believe I am, I feel that I am simply a realist. I will give you a test, the next time you are at church and you are in the parking lot trying to get out look around and examine the faces of your fellow church goers. Inevitably you will see at least one with the look of complete disgust on their face with the slowness of the traffic leaving the church. Not even out of the church parking lot and the grace of God is already slipped from their mind, gone – I have not gone to church in years but did this experiment many times and it proves out, every time. So, I know you are thinking that is not true, well it is my truth and like any truth it needs to be examined and believed individually. Try it for yourself. You also have remove the rosy glasses that organized religion provides and be open to the truth, no matter where it comes from. Sometimes the truth is ugly and not something you want to see and not something you want to admit is in you. In my earlier years my pig headedness and stubbornness and blind beliefs simply blocked these easy to see hard truths, especially when placed against my own shining example (I had a high opinion of myself back then – some might even say sanctimonious). That lackadaisical approach to my early beliefs created MANY problems along my journey.

Through all of my journeys, I have also learned that there are a range of possibilities for the meaning of our lives. On one end of the spectrum we have, and I will use an analogy here, life starting, the annual bulb being planted in the ground during the spring, or when we are conceived. The little sprouts pop forth searching for the sunlight and start to grow, we are born and cared for. We, along with our flowers, reach some early stage of development, childhood and growing up. We reach our stride, like the flower starting to bloom and then comes the autumn. Our flower starts to slow down, fade and eventually die in the winter, not unlike us, getting older and passing away. Maybe, just maybe, it is that simple, we are nothing more than an evolutionary inevitability. We are born, grow old and die, like everything else on the planet and maybe that is all there is to it. The other end of that spectrum is the story of the Bible and we all end up in either a glorious Heaven or a miserable Hell. That is one part that is not as discussed as much and a discrepancy in the plan as I see it. If you believe that there is a Heaven, then you must also believe in Hell and recognize that God also created Hell. Personally I never understood or could reconcile that God would create such a place and send people of his flock to that place.
Anyway, I have come to be OK with it, no matter which end of spectrum may be the truth. Maybe, as the Buddhists believe, we are reincarnated, what we come back as depends on the culmination of our Karma from this and previous lives. What I have found is that all major religious groups and spiritual societies have a set of guidelines, rules for living right if you will and I think you might. They all basically tell us to do the right thing. Christianity has the ten commandments, Buddhism has a range of Precepts, depending on whether one is a monk, or layperson and in the Qur'an there are more than 10 commandments and Hindu’s have 5 principles and 10 Disciplines and Taoist’s have up to 1000 commandments depending on the sect we are talking about. I have never liked the word commandments, it implies a dictatorial relationship with your highest religious figures and that, I would think, was not the intent as it countermands the rest of it. In my opinion, folks – relax, this is all just my opinion and my truths and what I have observed and found on my journey. Each of us have our own journey and yours will different than mine and different from anyone else’s. If by chance your dander is up, it might help to refer back to paragraph 4 sentence 1. If you are being truthful with yourself someone else’s opinion should not make you question your own beliefs or even get mad about what is working for someone else, I am just saying.

So through all of that I have distilled it down to something that my simpleton brain can understand, be an upright person – the best person you can be. Don’t lie, steal, cheat, kill or any of the stuff we know is wrong. Right and wrong is really that simple – black and white and those who want to muddy it up with conversations about gray areas simply do not have the moral courage of their convictions or maybe they do not even the convictions to begin with. It is easy to let one little thing slip, oh I will take this or cheat on that or do whatever it is we know is wrong. Well if you compromise who you are, even a little, it becomes easier next time and once accustomed to the small lies the ones just a little bigger will start to come easy as well and the next thing you know……… So I try VERY hard not to compromise my principles, my moral and ethic foundations are strong and no matter the situation I will not lie to you or steal from you or do what we all know is wrong. Not even a little because once you compromise yourself you are on a slippery slope because you have figured out how to lie to yourself. When you can do that, you might as well admit defeat in the game of life because you missed the point. My unbending ethical foundation is hard to maintain and has caused me many a hardship throughout my life, tiny ones with Bride, big ones with friends, and huge ones at work and most every other area of my life. Seems it might have been easier to just go to church and sit in the pew, depending on the sermon giver to tell me what their truth is.

So what does all that mean? It means it is not easy to be a good person, your beliefs will be challenged every day and in every way. Being a good man is what gets me through the days. I try hard not to question or judge others or the methods they use to get through their days, I do not really care. I have enough problems with myself. Everything else is just fluff, my striving to be a good man is NOT following anyone else’s doctrine, it is what I have found makes me happy and helps me get through my days. If believing in God is what makes you happy then I am happy for ya. Finding happiness and something to help you get through the days is truly rare in our society (look at the # of antidepressant prescriptions if you need proof). If believing in Allah is working for ya, bless ya my friend because a lot of people never find any happiness and nothing to help them through. To me, it does not matter what the “it” is, as long as you can be true to “it” and you find peace and happiness in it.

To sum all that up, if our foundation of morality is in tack, the mortality thing will take care of itself!

I love you Brother Bill