Position: Relative
Relativity is everything.
Do yourself a big favor. Take some time today or tomorrow to feel small. Grab a chair and sit outside for 15 minutes. No cell phone, no laptop, no music. Sit. Observe. Use your senses.
I did that tonight. I grabbed a banana as soon as I got home and went out on my upper balcony. I sat in a chair and I observed, and it made me feel good.
The sky straight above housed the moon, a few stars, and was a deeply saturated blue. As it lowered toward the horizon it first faded to a light blue, then to a pinkish orange, finally making it’s mind up and settling on orange and red, with pink clouds distributed sparingly above the mountains.
I traced a plane blinking across the sky high above me. I noticed how the tree over to the right seemed to be entirely black and two dimensional. I could hear people with destinations driving somewhere off into the distance and healthy people trotting by on the sidewalk a few stories down. A porch light turned on as someone was heading out to pick up dinner.
All of this made me think. Being raised a christian, my immediate thought turned to a man behind the scenes before correcting my thoughts — something a born-christian, converted-atheist apparently has to do pretty frequently. The longer I sat and observed, the more I realized there’s way too much free will all around us for this to be scripted. In my life, as much as I’ve tried to believe that someone has their finger on the dial of this celestial train set, I always come back to logic and reason. I’m an intellectual person, and I have always had trouble trusting my mind to the status quo. As such, I question. I sit, I observe, I question, and I reach my own conclusion.
Being raised a christian has embedded in me that God exists. My doubting nature has been the opposition to this constant, though, and about 5 years ago I switched from christian to agnostic. We, as humans, will never be able to know if God is around. Some who claim to know are really only talking about the strength of their faith. The fact I keep running into is that we cannot know, one way or another. The only truth I do know is that if God is out there then we haven’t heard from him yet or been able to observe him with our physical senses. In my mind, though, everything I know and have experienced has taught me that such a being cannot exist in this world… and so I changed my religious status to Agnostic-Atheist.
This post, which started out so descriptively worded, may offend religious people. That’s not my intent. I’m not a heartless, wreckless person out to destroy morals. I have morals of my own and my parents made sure of that. I’m not evil.
I’m actually anti-war… war means killing, and unlike most of the middle states, I don’t believe in mafia style justice and deregulated hunting of human beings. What this country has been through is bad, yes… but we have to look at what we’ve done to the rest of the world. We’ve been on our high horse for a while, but we’re not invincible.
These are just a few of my thoughts. Taking a few minutes to myself has given me a little dose of reality. The world keeps turning, and I strongly suggest taking some time to yourself this week to relax and observe it.
