The Kickoff

I decided on the title of this newsletter pretty much ‘off the cuff”. I had to boil it down in a few seconds so I could water the garden. I don’t keep the flowers and birds waiting as they have delivered to me the most pleasure imaginable.

HOW IS YOUR LOVELIFE?

Why do we refer to the need to have more ‘willpower”? Do we understand fully what we mean by that? Do we even understand what we mean by “fully”? Are you getting the scent of this quaint and classical “problem”? What is even meant by “meaning”?

Well, let’s settle in and figure we are on our way to something, perhaps even something valuable. Would that indicate that we are heading towards an ability to go back and forth between thinking and doing ,with a bit more efficiency? I hope so.

WILL LOVE FIND A WAY?

I believe we are going to have to begin with “Entropy” . Here is the God’s truth about my introduction to that word and here you will see how a paradox manages to reach escape velocity and meet itself on the path years later.

What Is It That Finds A Way?

CAN YOU BE INTERESTED IF I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT YOU?

In 1980 I took a job as counter help in a cafe in Seattle. While there I made many friends among my coworkers and became particularly interested in not one but two of the women there, in a “romantic” sense. As this played out in ways I felt I could mostly predict,I was surprised by the manager of the cafe, who had hired me. I had made a point of not using my radar on her,as she was the boss and very much in charge of how my bread got buttered.

She said that she heard I was doing a photography project and as it happened, she was very “into” photography, so perhaps we should meet after work and go to her place so she could show me her photographs.

The Experiment Begins

We went to a restaurant after work and had a fine meal and some sparkly drinks. Then to her place ,where the photographs were. Sitting next to her on the sofa,we began the viewing of the photos. A couple of glasses of wine further north of that, I spied a dictionary and I said maybe we should get random guidance for the project from that.

MOVE TO THE FLOOR

So I opened it to “Entropy” There were a couple of definitions but my memory gives me this one: The measurement of the rate of energy decrease in a closed system. or pretty close to those words. She then said “I am attracted to you and don’t know how to tell you{?}”

It struck us that there was no time to waste and also, there was no time like the present or even other than the present and as we were already on the floor with a holy dictionary, we got busy adding value.

IS THIS THE ONLY UNIVERSE? IS THAT A DUMB QUESTION?

Ultimately ,one cannot see oneself the way “others” do. But we find ourselves replaying the movie that we call “our lives” ,sometimes obsessively, as if we hadn’t gnawed all the meat off the bone first time around. What is the wisdom in “going back” ? How can memory be more useful or less?

From that moment on the floor,brought together by a passion for getting to the bottom of any question, regardless of size or context, we [my manager and me] proceeded to get married ,do other projects and later get divorced. Were we still in a closed system? had that been the case all along?

One could certainly claim an increase in facility around romantic relationships after being in a few but does this facility get us out of hardened patterns? I doubt it. Could we have avoided our rendezvous ,with its procession of bucolic moments,accusations, indiscretions,attorneys,therapists,et al? Where were those bootstraps we hear about?

My partner in this passed from this plane in 2008 and we managed to get on good terms prior, just before she died. But is that system closed?

Obviously, there is a market demand for knowing where in the hell we are. A GPS for our “life’s path” [as one might say this in Sedona]. The question of where is concurrent with who. As in,”Who’s asking?”

What will follow will be mostly fiction [insofar as fiction really exists] and will hopefully keep my out of the clutches of the beady eyed sorts that level slander suits. I will do my best not to have the characters get too real but I feel it is my duty to help with the question of “Free Will”.