Fatigue and Going Forward

Sometimes I get so tired I just want to stop. But my brain is always busy. Some part of it is always running around, thinking or watching or watching itself think. What once seemed so important now seems irrelevant. I watch politics play politics like a perpetual motion machine, and realize that politicians rarely get anything significant done unless their backs are against the wall. Self-interest always plays first. That’s why all the great fictional scenarios about people with great power and influence using that power and influence to end things like, oh, poverty and war, are just fiction. Oh, yes, there are good people out there who have an abundance and use it for the greater good, but they are so rare that they might be saints or certainly saintly. As for me, what little power I have I generally keep to myself these days, except in words. I always have words, and I use them often, freely, and in great number. It’s just that so few read my words, and the majority who do are seated in the choir. So I complain. I grouse. I write, shout, think. I grow tired. I ask myself why I bother, and then I bother. It’s in me, I can’t help it, I have a big mouth and my mind is always busy. And then I remember – I always remember – how bad things are for so much of humanity and I feel shame. I could do more. There is so much to do. But the shame does pass – I will not let shame rule me. Guilt, okay, a little, but not shame. Shame is a disaster. Shame is a spirit-killer. So, when I sit down to write, I go wherever the spirit takes me. sometimes it’s a sketch for a future idea. Sometimes it’s my blog, sometimes it’s a two word refinement of a finished (I thought) project. Often it’s a journal entry – I call my entries poems. Those poems often are sad, or angry, but most of the time when I sit down to write one, I want to be happy. And you know what? When I finish it, I am, at least for as long as it takes for the next thought to enter my head. So… //Grand Thoughts /Life finds a way, yes. /My grandson warns me with much enthusiasm /When the kickball slides down the hill /Toward the bushes, “Stop it! Opa! /It must not reach the pokey field!” /I watch him scramble on five year old legs, /Always a race, always grabbing a head start, /Changing the rules as he goes along, /And I marvel at the future /With all the trepidation of a cautious deer /And all the hope of an osprey in flight. /Extinction and mutation are the same thing, /Sometimes, /And life always finds a way, smiling /From the top of the food chain all the way /To the bottom. /We are the caretakers who lost the manual /Somewhere in the pokey field.