Between sheets

It’s not a nice, comfy feeling when you feel like shit. It’s not that you feel overwhelmed with joy and peace, or fulfillment and satisfaction. It’s not that you feel on top of the world. Quite  the contrary in fact - if you feel like shit, you feel like you were on the bottom of a dried out lake, cold and shaking, wrapped in rotting leaves, their bad smell enveloping you like an old, stale blanket. 

Shit: “How do you know I feel like that? I don’t even know what a dried out lake is. I do know rotting leaves, but I appreciate their company. And I like their smell, too. Question of taste. 

In fact, I can’t share your judgement about my feelings at all - I feel overwhelming joy and peace for just being me, just being shit. Full of acceptance of my condition, I wouldn’t like to be something else.”

Was it fever? Or was it real? Whatever it was, those words certainly did open my eyes to our anthropocentrism and absolute lack of empathy when we talk about the feelings of shit. You can’t apply the same norms to excrements as you do to humans. What makes us, people, happy, for instance - warm rays of sun on our faces - doesn’t necessarily make shit happy - it makes it thirsty, and dried out, above all. Any browner it doesn’t need to become.

It still is quite likely that I do feel like shit sometimes. Only not in the moments when I claim to feel like it. Don’t be unfair to shit. You know little of its feelings.

Patience

Patience is a virtue. It consists in waiting for something which doesn’t come, showing no sign of irritation, feeling no haste, just waiting, joyfully doing other things in the meantime. Stopping briefly from time to time, to check whether the thing you’ve been waiting for has already arrived only to assert it hasn’t, and peacefully resume the other things you’ve been doing in the meantime.
Waiting implies at least some nuisance to the one who is waiting, some boredom and uneasiness. It implies impatience, in fact.
But true patience is a kind of waiting without really waiting. Being open for whatever comes or does not come. 

When I read the story about the extinction of the dinosaurs, which made it possible for mammals to gain ground, and finally evolve into the very impatient species called humans,  I couldn’t but marvel at the incredible patience of the author of this whole universe. 

If it was dinosaurs he was after, well, then he had been waiting for quite a while. Make sure that the Earth gets created first, and then sit back and relax, watching the different forms of life come to life a billion years later, then enjoy the appearance of the dinosaurs and their dying out, then us... Or was it us he was after finally, and that’s why he let the dinosaurs go? 

I think it’s quite arrogant to claim we were his ultimate goal. That everything before us was meant to happen so that we evolve from the apes, make a mess of our planet and start to question the copyright of the creator. 

I don’t think that particular author cares about his copyrights anyway. Copyright is finally about money, and why would the author of the whole universe need any? 

I think it’s quite likely that we too, just as the dinosaurs, are to die out to leave room for other, perhaps more advanced, perhaps more primitive, species. How could the creator allow it? Let us die out? The exquisite creatures that we are?

But he is not like us. Impatience is not his vice.

It was Einstein who said “The only reason for time so that not everything doesn’t happen at once”. It’s the existence of time that makes us so terribly impatient. If time did not exist we’d have it all, at once. 

And the Creator? He’d waited without needing to wait, for the dinosaurs, the apes, us and whatever is still to come.