No Place Like Om

I like to think I’m a mellow fellow as I enter my autumnal years. I’d also like to think I’m six feet tall, but if I bought trousers based on that belief, I wouldn’t need to wear shoes if you follow my drift. Yeah, the line between healthy self-construct and delusions of adequacy tends to disappear out here in the weeds pretty quickly when you’re cruising at sixty plus and I’m not talking about in a car.

I admire the California Casual of what I understand to be Buddhism-the article describes it as more a philosophy of life than an organized religion. Truth to tell, my growing up in the Roman Catholic faith was way more than an “organized” religion, it was closer to ‘double-time harch!’ The Good Lord may have given me free will but Sister Mary Jean had little inclination to let me use it.

My stumbling block with achieving enlightenment through Buddhism isn’t religious or philosophic, it’s entomological. It’s one thing for me to shrug off a gnat buzzing in my ear as part of The Bigger Plan, but I draw the line at creepy-crawlies like silverfish and cockroaches. They make me want to hurl and I am never happy to encounter them.

They are ugly-I assume they feel the same way about me and if our sizes were reversed, I have little doubt they would be stepping on me, to the point of stomping, because that’s what I do when I see them. Talk about Riverdance. 

That moment of ‘here’s another traveler on our shared planet…I wonder what the journey holds for you, grasshopper’ happens, if at all, only in hindsight. (And I’m still waiting on it, so Bob's your uncle and there's your answer.)

I surprised one or the other, I didn’t have glasses on but I did have my high-pitched shrieky voice with me, the other morning as I hopped around the shower at work wearing a pair of flip-flops, a panicked expression and precious little else. 

If they made Rain-X for eyeglasses, I’d see every one of these booger-bears from a hundred meters away but until they do, I step and stomp on barely-seen critters at least 300 bazillion times, reducing them to their sub-atomic particles in the process.

If you or someone you know believes in reincarnation which as I understand it entails a number of stops on the Great Wheel as you head toward The Center and true enlightenment (and not all of those stops are promotions, so to speak), you might want to commit to memory now to avoid me or future me’s in any next life encounters. 

Because instead of becoming one with the universe should we encounter one another, I’ll attempt to make you one with a piece of ceramic tile, and will worry about the consequences of sola fide vice shoe soles only when forced to.

-bill kenny