View from a Wolf

Gotta tell you, kids, I’m feeling my age a lot more recently.

It’s not that I’m feeling feeble or particularly ancient or anything.

It’s that I’ve seen way too much of it all. When you see something often enough, you start to see patterns.

I see young women and men, trying to impress each other. The dance of existence continues, despite everything.

Despite wars, despite worries about the future, despite the lack of housing or decent wages. Despite the wars on abortion. Despite race relations taking a hit.

Despite it all, life looks to find a way. So girls primp, and guys look to romance them.

In between time, the young look for ways to survive. They take jobs where they can get them, and they hope to make money so they can buy a car and a small place to impress their friends and romantic interests.

Many despair about being able to do any of it. They wonder if they’re alone, there on the sidelines.

Those who got jobs work at not being found to be frauds. The ancient among us (raises hand) will tell you that it’s a well-known condition identified as “imposter syndrome”. We will tell you that far more people feel this way, than don’t. What our betters and peers never told us is that no one has all the knowledge; we accumulate it along the way.

And so we work, we make money, we buy things, we buy bigger things. Some of us can’t seem to stop buying, and we have Amazon bookmarked just to make it easier to consume consume consume.

And none of it – NONE OF IT – matters in the slightest. We know that intellectually – that we won’t care about our cars or how much money is in the bank when we’re on our deathbed.

I’m here to tell you that realization happens far sooner than the deathbed. As in now.

I look at young adults doing their dance, and I can’t help but smile. At the end of the day the media doesn’t play the tune to which they’re dancing. Life itself plays that song. Despite the media. Despite the disparity in incomes. Despite the unfairness of it all.

People still need to live. Want to live. WILL live, despite it all.

We are not doomed. Not by a long shot. No matter how crazy things look right now – they’ve actually been worse in the past. So this world stage we’re looking at is not new. Not in the slightest.

And this world isn’t the start and end of all things either. There’s more than the naked eye can see. We’re just limited by these bodies we’re in.

And that’s another thing: we are not human bodies stumbling around this earth. We are spiritual beings housed in these bodies temporarily. Someday these bodies will stop. Who knows what happens to us after that.