Day 123j: Ever dodging Danger … (August 30, 2019)
NOTE to any & all future eastern U.S. Peace Pilgrims: Even well after rush hour, Highway 15 from Point of Rocks to Leesburg is ridiculously dangerous, with just two lanes of traffic, mostly moving at high speed, and no semblance of shoulders upon which to safely walk … And another NOTE to those same travelers: Your truest victory and your greatest success comes never in the form of the next city or township reached, but rather in every single next step taken …
“To know another person, simply look at the particular fears he or she attends &/or actualizes. Similarly, to know your own current state of being, look at how you are responding to &/or living with your fears. Fear in itself is not important. And yet fear is always present; always standing there and pointing you in the opposite direction of the things that are truly important. So don’t be afraid of your fears, they’re not there to scare you or tempt you astray. Rather, they are there to empower you – to inspire you – to let you know that life is worth living and worth living boldly … Indeed, we are going to die, and that truth actually makes us the lucky ones. For by far most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. In truth, the potential people who could have been here in my place but who will actually never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, greater scientists than Newton, and greater activists that Martin Luther King. And we know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people in existence. And so, in the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in all our random ordinariness, that are here. It is we who are the privileged few, those who won the lottery of birth against all odds. So how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? So let us remember this greatest of blessings, and choose to go forth today as one of the knowingly privileged few – and live with an according swath of selfless panache & joyful bravery.” ~ inspired by C. Joybell C. & Richard Dawkins
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