OK, I get up this morning and go to the computer to check my mail.
A game that my youngest son recommended is finished loading off of STEAM. (He has recommended the most excellent games to me. The last one was “Life is Strange“, things new, that I would not have explored, but that are intensely interesting and unique.). As I am just exploring the beginnings (Fucking weird and intense, it begins with a romance, marriage, then his wife begins getting early onset Alzheimer’s, hospitalized, he takes a job as a fire watcher to get away from it all. It is called, appropriately, “Firewatch“.)
Anyway, I am playing it when I see what I thought was a fly hovering between me and the screen. Try to kill it. Sure I got it, but no.
It ISN’T a fly, it is a tiny spider, hovering, always between me and the monitor. I reach above it to try to catch the thread of its web to set it down somewhere else, and realize it is not hanging from above, it is floating on air currents from a thread ATTACHED TO ME. To my glasses.
I take the thread and set him down below the monitor, but he is up and floating again within 5 minutes. He is telling me something, but I don’t know what it is. So I stop and think, and let myself wonder.
I do not know what it is. There is no rule book. But there is something here that is very important. When strange things like this happen in your life, LISTEN, even to the very small ones. They are tiny windows into a world that is DIFFERENT than yours. These windows are important. They allow you to see something outside of your life. I don’t know. Maybe that is what my spider friend is trying to tell me.
Moments that you do not understand, moments that (yes) confuse you, are important. They show you that you are NOT all knowing, all understanding, that everything is NOT within your control. Of course, most people would except that. They know they can not control everything. But we think we understand that, and understand the “WHY”. Even in moments when things are not going our way, we think that “WHY” they are not going our way is understood, something I did, something he did, bad timing, whatever. But they are not. In the vast number of cases we do not know, and we certainly do not understand when they do go our way.
But that is good. That is VERY good. That is the lesson, I think. We have to be comfortable with that. Life IS a mystery, really, and that is, in a very powerful way, why it is worth living. It creates Wonder. A completely understood life is, maybe, a little bit, maybe a lot, boring.
The Eroticist