Dan in Real Life

So many of the stories we tell ourselves are about our capacity for change, our essential good nature. Today I will start aikido. It will be good for my body and will give a new form for my life to organize itself around. Tomorrow I will find an apartment. My parents will have space again.

We see all these ways in which we can change the essential organization of our worlds. Better living every where. But what if it's not enough? What if these hopes and stories turn out to be nothing more than a stabilizer for our mind? Life, it turns out, is semi-deterministic. We can't escape so many things. And we want to. It would be so... it would be so nice if we could turn our backs on it all. If when we closed our eyes, the monsters all went away.

Sometimes, when we open our eyes, we are surrounded by goodness. The world should always be like that. Enveloped in goodness, fear doesn't exist. When fear doesn't exist, we can let the goodness find us. We aren't stuck trying to fight off our shadows.

There were a few movies I saw last year that were essentially about goodness. About good people. About finding our way out of the shadows. I feel thankful for that. I hope they keep coming.