Dicks

photo by joeball

Many will bemoan the loss of tradition, complaining about the way, for instance, that the true spirit of Christmas—or Superbowl Sunday—has been forsaken; and while it’s important to venerate that which has brought us here, it’s also vital to respond to the world as it is.

We live, as the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti reminds us, in a universe of thought, and it’s easy enough to take those thoughts as the only way the universe can be and so it’s good, I think, to allow the past to influence the present without being utterly beholden to the way things went before.

We can come to appreciate, therefore, how Santa eventually usurps Jesus (at least for the time being) or over time, how fries become burgers while the commemoration of freedom remains intact.

Think of what our human brethren around the world might give for the opportunity to pedal to even one such bountiful purveyor of local delicacies; but four? 

I marveled at the way bicycles braved routes built mainly for cars and nearly fainted when our friend Mr. Double-Truck was somehow avoided by dozens of tiny two-wheelers in Wallingford.

One of the characteristic human dilemmas is to rectify the map with the territory, the plan and the present, our expectations and reality; how we do so depends upon principle.

Democracy may be, as Churchill put it, the worst form of government except for all other forms that have been tried, but that doesn’t mean it works in situations where nobody really knows what he or she wants in isolation.

That’s when it’s sometimes better to simply stipulate, based on a standard of inclusion, what comes next.   (Even if an Angry Hippy is literally begging for an alternative.)

Because, after all, it’s much easier—in keeping with the Descartes’ well-known admonition—to change ourselves rather than the world at-large.

And in the end, if you get to swim one last time in this summer’s lake, you do.