Recent Posts
-
How Long Did It Take To Get To You?
2 August 2021
-
If Luck Is With You…
2 August 2021
-
The Cure to The Most Dangerous Virus of All Time
2 August 2021
Works in Stone
If Luck Is With You…
George Cappannelli
The title of this blog comes from an old Afghan adage. Here’s how the whole thing reads –
“If luck is with you, why worry? If luck is not with you, why worry?”
Makes sense, doesn’t it? And yet if it does, why do we agree to keep living in a world that seems to have forgotten this piece of valuable, common sense wisdom?
Instead the mantra of our time has become…more, faster, cheaper. Yes, productivity and performance, scaling up, doing rather than being, accumulating, consuming, accomplishing…these are the primary watchwords and instructions the majority of us live by. And yet what have they brought us? Stress, anxiety, confusion, competition, exhaustion and empty promises of a Golden Age that never quite materializes.
As I write these words, I am reminded of a cartoon I saw a number of years ago in a daily newspaper. I think it was the NY Times. It showed a man in suit and tie with a hat on his head and a briefcase in his hand struggling mightily to climb up a mountain made of cow paddies at the top of which was a single rose. The caption which I paraphrase read,
“The Trouble Is That Often By The Time We Get To The Top, We’ve Lost Our Sense of Smell.”
And if the cartoonist will excuse my taking some liberty with his work, I feel compelled to add – “Our sense of feeling, our sense of meaning and purpose, our compassion and, too often, our integrity.”
Ah, life in the modern world! A life in which we have been programmed, and in far too many ways, are required to expend our precious life energy as well our individual birth right, our true life’s purpose, our unique dreams, and our gifts and talents in pursuit of security – a thing that so many wise beings throughout history have told us is an illusion. Yes, security along with safety and control. Helen Keller called them the Three Great Illusions. Illusions that, unfortunately keep us moving doggedly along in lock step, prisoners in the great army of the gainfully employed, indentured servants to the Great Economy that exhausts us as well as the majority of the natural resources on our planet. All this on the way to driving us - Homo sapiens and millions of our species closer to the edge of extinction. That, of course, while threatening the very well-being and regeneration of the earth itself.
I know I sound cynical to some of you, but in truth my heart aches for humanity and for what we have, through omission and commission, allowed to be done and done ourselves to badly abuse the extraordinary gift of life on a truly miraculous planet.
A rapper I heard recently put it this way.
If the entire 4 plus billion year history of the evolution of Planet Earth is likened to one a 24 hour day. This catastrophe that we – Homo sapiens - have visited upon ourselves, on the other species and on our habitat has occurred in only 3 seconds of this 24 hour day.
Is it too late? Some claim it is. But having spent so much time anguishing and struggling against this possible reality, I have decided to ask - why worry? Why not instead roll of up sleeves, get our hands really dirty with Ink stains, paint stains, dirt and dust stains and blisters. Let’s throw our heads back and howl at the Goddess of the Moon. Let’s open our hearts and let our muse sing her full throated melody though us.
Hell, if we are heading for the edge, why not go out with a bold, remarkable, audacious and extraordinary burst of creativity. Let‘s express our dreams, the ones that only we can dream and share. Let Henry Miller’s good advice become our battle cry. “To paint (create) is to love and to love again is to live life fully.”
And above all, let’s send those tired reactionaries who insist on keeping us permanently in captivity and in service to a dead-end pathway packing. Aren’t we tire of hearing them whistle their tired and off-tune version of Sweet Dixie as they try to stumble backward? And if, like Moses, we can only go to the edge of the promised land, let’s at the very least set the stage for the next Root Race who will pick up the banner and carry it on the next lap toward home.
After all…” if luck is with us, why worry? If luck is not with us, why worry?”
Share this post on:
