Trash day

I felt something odd come over me today. I was on my way to treat a friend to breakfast when an obstacle appeared in our path. It seems as though a trash can had been emptied all around the entrance area of the Campus Store. I felt compelled to pick up the trash when at some point I froze. I thought to myself, "this isn't my job. someone else gets paid to deal with this."

Out of self-interest I picked up a few pieces of plastic until there were only paper products left scattered among an area of roughly 12 ft².

Is it not my responsibility to stop and aid in whatever clean-up efforts are required of me? Am I not an able man who can bend over? Am I not capable of work?

This responsibility manifested within a place where my soul reaches outward into a space I do not own nor control. I can attempt to but will only fail when faced with the limitations of the boundaries that the Divine has set for me.

Yet, rather than pick up the remaining trash that was still sitting on the lightly frosted concrete, I felt a sense of freedom. I had the choice to walk past it within the rights of "it's not my job".

I feel that traces of guilt are building up. Small doses that grow...I must root this before it grows further. Perhaps the weeds of my conscience will sprout up from time to time but nothing that will require much effort to clean up.

Is ignorance truly Bliss? I would argue...

Virtue by Virtue

What is virtue? Is virtue an end result to a means that can come in many forms? Or is virtue the means that leads to an end that forms from many different origins? Being the intellectual animals that we are we often seek answers to many of life's questions. We've searched through science, religion, mythic interpretations, holistic interpretations, and yet we still cannot answer it all. Even the small amount that we've been able to wrap our head around seems to slip into doubt as more time passes. It seems like both the eastern and western traditions alike have tried very different approaches to finding what this Truth is all about. Both seem to come close but nearly miss with maybe an exception or two. How can we raise a global conscious in a time span that needs urgent action when it has taken thousands of years of mistakes of grand and small scales to lead us a millimeter in the right direction? Can we make significant strides and "snap-out" of our cloudy state of mind to focus on the problems that plague us the same way they did those that lived in that distant yet short past?

Virtue

After reading the last portions of Thoreau's Walden I am left with a ponderation of virtue. A classic cliché that I hear is "It's not the destination, it's the journey." How true is the experience of pursuing virtue opposed to attaining it? In our experience as sentient beings we attempt to make reason of our existence and the purpose behind it all. While reason can explain a lot in our existence it cannot predict much of anything! Perhaps this is where the limitations of science begin to feel their ceiling. We, as a species, seek so tirelessly a way to justify the means of our existence. We battle for and manufacture whatever pittance we can muster up to justify our lives in a manner that science, however ideal in its nature, can suggest to us the correct course of our behavior and actions. We live in an "economically-based society" that runs its whole operation based upon equations and theories that have not be proven to work. Yet we trust that this system built of imaginary mathematics will give us the very means to our fulfilled ends. We trust without knowing what trust is. We act without knowing what action is. We base our observations on previous interpretations without pursuing our own understanding of what life entails.