“What did I learn today?”
I learned something yesterday: I realized that instead of asking, “What can/did I do today,” I can ask, “What can/did I learn today?” Or even more to the point, in present tense: “What am I learning today/right now?”
Interesting that my realization came yesterday on a day when one notable event (among others) was a vehicle accident that happened right in front of me, when a pickup passed going 70 MPH toward a red light the driver didn’t see until too late, so he couldn’t brake enough to avoid rear-ending the car stopped in the lane ahead. ”Oh, sorry,” the geezer said to the distraught (but uninjured) young Hawaiian woman in the car he hit.
I guess the obvious lesson here (for all concerned) is, “Be careful.” It could go deeper into, “Life is short, be happy,” or, a favorite saying of my mother’s, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Indeed, “Everything is happening in perfect time” … but not for all of the people all of the time. Or, to the follow the American theme, the event could signal the financial “crash” of an out-of-control empire in denial of the red light ahead. Hmm, what’s that in my other browser window? “Don’t say we didn’t warn you this time — a new crash is dead ahead” (link from Michael Ruppert’s blog).
Maybe I caused the accident by my driving too slowly (only 5-10 MPH over the speed limit), or by dropping the avocado I bought just before getting into the car twenty minutes earlier. In short, I’m still not sure what I learned about that accident. It’s a kind of synchronicity, which Jung in coining the word claimed has meaning but not necessarily in any defined sense. A sense of appreciation of essence. In witnessing this accident, for instance, the scene went from fast motion to slow motion, to surreal … rather like the dreams I used to have about working at the airport taxiing planes and watching helplessly as they plowed into the terminal.
Life is like that sometimes. Space-time bends as opposites collide in a flash of light, and into the vacuum moves life and death, marriage and birth, pain and grace, creation and destruction.
