FIND THE GOOD

 

We need to find the good.

We need to form an FBI quality search party, spread out and comb the wild frontier for it because bad news has become the unpredictable and wrath-filled weather that comes raging at us by the minute with the fury of a woman scorned.

Day after day, first thing in the morning, we unconsciously dress our brains and bodies in anticipation of its inevitable arrival.  We literally ask ourselves, “What

 should I put on today that will shield me from today’s avalanche of depressing and/or shocking news?

Our go-to, in case of emergency safe houses are all our devices and houses of mass distraction that broadcast the TV shows that we lose ourselves in, the films that we watch from the popcorn and Raisinettes slathered womb of theater darkness (with its parent vigilant EXIT signs), the books (and comic books) with their infinite primary color portals of fantasy escape and illusion of self-empowerment, the songs that inspire us to dance more by ourselves than with a passionate partner who just might make us deeper and better or that stocked for depression and anxiety medicine cabinet which scientifically alters us just enough so that we can out run the shadows that chase us.

Sometimes the tribal murmur of NPR in the background can be soothing. To me and my impenetrable child-guarded imagination, It often sounds like a bunch of deeply concerned doctors who are passionately conferring and debating about how to approach my complex condition.  Just hearing those wheels in motion calms me down and gives me hope that I will live to see another day.  They are my Sloan and my Kettering.

We need to find the good.

And good can be found at our every turn and in Van Gogh lavender field abundance.  

In front of you on the grumpy line of the coffee shop, is an adored and hug-held toddler who is, at the tender age of two, already a seasoned veteran whose one and only job is to make eye contact with you and smile until it feels like the sun just broke through the clouds and has landed on the beachfront of your war-torn furrowed brow.

Out in there in the concrete jungle, friendly, ready to greet you beasts roam, canines all, who I have always believed should be greeted like returning war heroes.   The second that I see a tail that is tick-tocking like a daffy metronome, I melted like a still on the griddle grilled cheese sandwich and accept my legion of honor which comes in the form of endless kisses. To slurp with love.  By the way, I would choose a canine life over nine lives any day of the week.  Cats to me will always be the ready to strike terrorists of the pet world whose sleeper cell is that litter box from hell.

But I digress.

We need to find the good.

The wind is also a close, personal friend of mine.  Watching it circumnavigate through the endless shock of happy flappy leaves on a particularly breezy day, makes me think of my mom’s fingertips when they would lightly trace my face like she was mesmerizing me, banking my presence in the vault of her heart for the days when I would be long ago and far away or separated by death.

Like now.

We also have at our command, a well-stocked soundtrack in the jukebox of our soul.  We are always a one memory button push away from calling up just the right song which ravishes us until we are thrilled by the entire concept of consensual helplessness.

We need to find the good.

The act of giving without a formal request is another route to finding the good.

It took The Beatles how many years to come up with, “The love you take is equal to the love you make??  Being voluntarily charitable, particularly when it comes to dispensing wisdom, turns you into a love machine that will make your invisible tail wag too.  

I have often wished that people, particularly women, came with tails attached so I could know, with absolute certainty, if they were happy or tail-half-mast pissed.   

Men do not come equipped with accurate temperature gauges.  And we are just as vain about our speedometers as you are.

We need to find the good.

Museums to me are the equivalent of a Mr. Peabody and Sherman time machine ride which can deliver us, on demand, back to the art and artifacts of the just the right ancient civilization which we need to visit the most.

The saints and wise men (and women) of the past, have not lost their step over the last 2018 years or so.

Despite appearances, muted paintings are never silent.  

If fact they are symphonic in size and scope, with their giant, vividly expressed stories and most intimate secrets shared. The artists that I love the most, the impressionists, remind me that people have changed little, if at all.  

Mother Nature created Human Nature and there is an unblemished, direct line between that conception and 23 and me...and you.

We need to find the good.

We need to remember that we are all booked, most of us shoved like sardines into the down below deck steerage world, aboard this high tech Titanic of ours and sooner or later it will be boy and girl get iceberg.

THE end, THE ultimate destination, OUR mutual coda, with the exception of those who believe in Heaven, is most definitely not the reason to be booked on this particular cruise.   

In the end of “The Americans,” (SPOILER ALERT), everyone is either isolated or alone which is the worst form of punishment.  Parents have lost kids.  Kids have lost parents.  Someone is in solitary instead of solidarity.  Priests defy their church.  Friends have lost friends.  Wives cannot be trusted.  

Houses are empty.

But that is the sacrifice of duty.  And sometimes of faith.

The only thing that can actively do about the condition of us is to find the good.   

To not leap to conclusions, to not live in perpetual fear,  to not bathe in the kind of hate that scalds the tender skin of our hearts and soul like a third-degree burn.

Being right makes you righteous but it does not make you kind, or loving or vulnerable to meeting the next human of your dreams.

We need to find the good.

We need to arm ourselves with our open arms and not the kind of arms that assassinate school children who are being slain in biblical proportions on the fields of purity and innocence.

We need to find the good.

We have to stop the Civil War that has never ended.  

We need to find some way to marry ourselves to one another in these United States of America instead of acting like bitter divorcees who are filled with bile and bitterness of estrangement.

We need to go back to square one.   Back to before there was an internet, before thereweres a million TV channels, before there was an Amazon BUY NOW button and stop trying to accumulate more toys than our neighbors because that is the provenance of children who demand and get all the attention that life and bewildered parents can possibly muster.

We need to stop depleting ourselves by filling ourselves up with empty things and worse, empty promises.

We need to lie less and weep more.

We need to sing more and talk less.

We need to compare and share our hearts instead of hiding it from each other and the world.

It always takes a tragedy to crack the protective bubble that isolates us, when tears flow like rivers and religions all seem to feel like one.

Which they are.

Languages, after are all, are just different ways of saying the exact same thing.

Our world is infinitely smaller but it is also intimately barren.

We don’t need more walls.

We have built far too many.

We need to tear them down and run towards each other, like, the returning war heroes, like the potentially happy dogs that we all are.

And where do you start?  

What is the first step that we all have to make?

We have to find the good.