Awaiting Further Instructions

A course of action must be chosen. Soon.

Now...

What are the costs of hesitation? 'What might have been' is the devil on your shoulder with an unpaid bill in his hand...

Constrained by what our antecedents would have likely thought of as distracting contrivances, we survive and thrive with little right, as far as they would be concerned, to take any credit for doing so. With more time than ever for reflection, we take our twilight walks along the edge of the abyss. Sometimes we toss a pebble in and wait. The silence teases us, bringing us to crawl cautiously to the precipice and peek over the edge, but almost never for more than a breath or two. The call of the warm bed, the promise of tomorrow, they pull us back and send us home with a skip in our step and humming a tune, a protective spell to keep down below the denizens of the dark.

But, occasionally, we stay and seek their counsel. We stare into the black and whisper, "I've come seeking knowledge. Truth."

The reply is always the same.

"The truth? Look here long enough and you'll see it."

Emergence

Your life.

You can sum it up by adding the individual pieces, but it will never come out in total to be anything like what you perceive it to be.

Where did all this complexity come from?

When you stop to think about it, all that you take seriously as a matter of course,... it really is trivial, isn't it? Why the need to entertain ourselves by artificially constructing elaborate dramas? Some amount of it is necessary, it would seem. But, do we need to take it to the levels we do?

Everything in here came from out there, 'here' being the realm of the mind. In here, it gets bent, pulled, compressed, and twisted, and the result goes back out there. Imperceptible at first, the lay of the land gradually changes. And the feedback, over time, fills us in on the details. The conscious mind, though, isn't immediately aware of the subtle differences.

And then one day it hits you; the times, they are a-changin'.