“For what purpose do we live?”  That’s easy for you, Ryuta. You’ve got a girlfriend. You have to live for her, regardless of whether that is actually your highest potential. Such is the requirement of love, you can’t just have it as a hobby.

I had a pretty bad stomach pain today.  Not very sharp but pretty broad, covering much of the actual stomach.  (Not guts, I am pretty sure.)  I suspect this was because I had gone to sleep on a too full stomach on Friday and suffered acid reflux in my sleep.  I got suddenly very tired earlier than expected that night.

Anyway, as usual when I am sick, I took a hard look at my life.  Ironically, two days from now I am going to read in an excerpt from one of Ryuho Okawa’s books that this is one of the primary functions of illness and a valuable service illness serves in our lives. That is, if we have a tendency to not take a good look at our lives otherwise, which successful people often don’t.  I suspect I don’t LOOK successful to you guys, but I sure feel pretty upbeat almost all of the time. Except when I am sick, and look back on my life and realize that I have just had fun almost all the time.  That I have almost never done anything worthwhile.

See, the real problem isn’t that I do anything wrong. It happens occasionally, but lately it has been pretty small stuff.  The real problem isn’t even that I don’t do anything good, although we are homing in now. The real problem is that I don’t even care. I don’t even want to live a life of giving love and selfless service.  I am fine with just having a good time. Obviously not in the booze and night clubs sense, but playing computer games, watching anime, reading or writing a book that interests me, or once in a while sit down and polish my halo a little before I move on to something more fun. I may help someone somehow in some small way if I don’t have to go out of my way to find them.

I guess in a sense I have kind of given up on humans.  The difference between them and me has become so large, they can’t reasonably be expected to understand me at all, or even to not spontaneously misunderstand me completely.

Let me give you an example. For as Okawa (“El Cantare” among friends) says, evil arises when people don’t understand or feel that they are not being understood. In the first case, they should get to learn to know others better; in the second case, they should learn to communicate better.  Well, I seem to understand pretty near anyone (possibly except some particularly demonic or saintly people, I am not eager to put that to the test) but I clearly fail to communicate. Actually, I have almost given up communication.  There is a pop song about that, did you know?  It is called “Communication”  by The Cardigans.  If you don’t know it, you owe it to yourself to listen to it at least once. It is a love song but it has a much deeper layer for those who get it. The chorus goes like this:

But that’s not an invitation
That’s all I get
If this is communication
I disconnect
I’ve seen you, I know you
But I don’t know
How to connect, so I disconnect.

The female singer goes through this for a while, and you’d think she’d eventually take a hint and give up. Certainly that is my natural response. Perhaps it is some fundamental feminine principle in the human soul or something, but she kind of keeps it more open in the last verse:

Well this is an invitation
It’s not a threat
If you want communication
That’s what you get
I’m talking and talking
But I don’t know
How to connect
And I hold a record for being patient
With your kind of hesitation
I need you, you want me
But I don’t know
How to connect, so I disconnect
I disconnect.

I guess I hold a record for being patient too, after more than 10 years of writing an open letter to my unknown friends.  But I don’t know how to connect either.  I just kind of hope that humans – or at least one or two humans – sometime in the future will come where I have been and see my footprints, and know that someone went this way before.

I should give you a good example, but the entry is creeping up on the “tl;dr” limit. (“Too Long; Didn’t Read.) Perhaps later, if there is a later. For now, I feel the urge to just get this post up and think a bit about Hell before I go to bed.