Why the chaos?

You probably already knew this, but I just learned from City of Wonder that the Land of Boredom borders directly on Meh.

Why the chaos in the Chaos Node? Why don’t I just pick one thing to write about and stick with it?

I know it is challenging to be a reader here. It is not so bad if you come here from Google and just happen to find an entry that is about just that one thing. But if you come back, the next day I probably write about something entirely different.  Certainly if you stay a week, there is bound to be stuff that doesn’t interest you in the least.

That’s because you are not me. I write all the time about things that interest me. Well, some things interest me more than others, but it must at least have crossed my mind to end up in my journal. Lots of things don’t cross my mind very often, like “what’s on TV” or “what’s wrong with Republicans now” or “good places to go out for dinner”, even though many (possibly most) of my online friends are occupied with such topics on a regular basis.  I am not them.

***

It would be easy to write and write about spiritual and religious matters. When you have a Heavenly spirit that lives with you at all times, even if undeserved, you could teach for a thousand years and more without ever running dry.  But to teach with authority, you still have to actually live these teachings for them to become yours. And that is the bottleneck.

Jesus Christ says: “Any teacher who is educated for the Kingdom of Heaven is like a homeowner  who brings out treasures new and old from his storage rooms.” See, you have to own the stuff to be a real “heavenly intellectual” to coin a phrase. You can’t just borrow it from the holy spirit that for some reason has conceded to keep you company. Bad things come from pretending to own what is not ours. Like a spiritual bank crisis or something.

Likewise Paul the apostle says: “I subjugate my body and keep it in slavery, so that I who preach for others shall not myself be found unworthy.” I don’t do much of that, at least by saintly standards (your standards will vary if you are a liberal, for sure) and so I am unworthy to teach many things that I could otherwise say. Because, as I said, I don’t really need to have a plan to teach about various topics of the spiritual life, since the fellow Presence in my life knows a lot about these things and shares freely.

***

It is substantially safer to write about City of Heroes or City of Wonder, even though the marvels there are rather two-dimensional in comparison. And writing about my experiences with cheap, safe exercise is probably a useful contribution to the world, without putting any souls in particular danger, not even my own.

Then again, I wrote about economy for years and years, and people kept making the mistakes I warned them against. Even now they still do. So I guess it could be the same with this. “Oh, this was kind of interesting. I always wondered how this ‘exercise’ thing worked. I had no idea it was THIS easy.” And then you turn on the TV and fall asleep in the couch with your hand in a bag of chips. ^_^

And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my tongue
but Hallelujah.
-Leonard Cohen.

Days of heavy legs

Today for the first time my afternoon walk took me over the same hill that I had crossed when I got the racing heart episode ten days ago. I was slightly nervous, or at least cautious, checking my pulse rather often, but nothing like that happened this time. I completed the whole circuit.

However, there is another phenomenon now. I have noticed it the last two days in particular: After about one hour’s brisk walking, my legs start to feel heavy. This is shorter than I habitually walk (around 20 minutes shorter) so the last leg of the trip, as it were, is somewhat unpleasant. But I don’t write this to whine. Rather, it kindled my scientific curiosity. Again.

More exactly, each trip has three phases now. For the first 35 minutes, the pulse is ridiculously low.  We’re talking from 110 down to less than 100 with brisk walking. Then for the next 25 minutes the pulse is typically around 120 with the same workload. And then after one hour, the legs start to feel heavy. (They always felt a bit stiff toward the end of a long walk, but not heavy, as far as I can remember.) Because I automatically slow down, the pulse also goes down a little. If I force myself to keep up the speed, it goes up slightly, but not much. So it seems to be something local to the muscles.

Why now? I don’t think the heart, even at 190 beats per minute, has the power to cause lasting changes in other parts of the body. Rather, I suspect it has to do with something else that was measured that day: My blood sugar was down to a perfectly normal 5.2 mmol, instead of my usual 6.1. As I’ve mentioned a couple times, it stayed on 6.1 even after fasting for 12 hours, and taking a 90 minute fast walk during those hours. So it moving is a bit of a big deal.

I thought at the time that either the heart had soaked up that much blood sugar, or the lower blood sugar had triggered the change in my heart rate. By now I am pretty sure that the heart – which runs fine on both fat and sugar – could not possibly be the cause. The measurement was made later when my pulse was down to around 100, the same as when walking slowly.

I won’t know until December, but I suspect that my slightly high blood sugar has disappeared. I have lost a few pounds, although I don’t seem to be losing more now, but so far they stay off.  As you may know, the fat cells (“adipose tissue”) send out a hormone called leptin. The fuller they are, the more leptin in the blood. This is a hormone that has a number of effects around the body. It lowers your brain’s appetite (although your actual stomach muscles will continue to churn when they have nothing to do). Mice who are immune to leptin have a voracious appetite and, given free food, end up double sized. But the hormone also regulates other aspects of metabolism, and is one of several factors that influence blood sugar level. Leptin is a long-term hormone, unlike insulin and the anti-insulin glucagon, which act in a matter of seconds or minutes.

So yeah, I suspect my blood sugar levels have fallen to normal human levels. Well, when I am not eating, which these days I do constantly.  Except when walking.  Perhaps I should bring along some sugar on the next trip and see what happens?

St Symeon and seeing the Light

The heavenly light form of Jesus Christ as imagined by a Japanese artist. (From the animated movie “The Laws of Eternity”.)

I just recently became aware that St Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022 AD) claimed to be able to literally “see the Light” – the heavenly form of Jesus Christ. This is actually not something most Christians claim to be able to do in any literal or near-literal sense. I shall assume that he was seeing this with spiritual sight, not actual photons striking the retina, although what do I know about Jesus and photons.

I haven’t studied the details of this yet. As I said, I only became aware of it a day or two ago, and only today did I realize the scope of this. It was not just some single event, although it evidently started out this way. But after years of asceticism he seems to have seen the Light on a regular basis, and even claimed that this was the purpose of human life. Or so I have read others say about him. I have yet to read any amount of his own writings.

I think regular readers can see why this would interest me. It would probably also interest our visiting Llama. But I doubt any of us would spend the rest of our days in extreme monastic life to find out. Probably not.

Further brief reading reveals that St Symeon had a very informal approach to religion, and while he would celebrate a yearly feast day for his spiritual teacher, he was not generally big on rules and ritual, and reproached those who thought Christianity was about such formal things. He held up personal experience as the original Christianity, and denounced as heresy the teaching that contemporary Christians (as of the year 1000) could not expect to have these same direct experiences as the first Christians.

Needless to say, Symeon was not entirely popular with the church authorities of the area, although the people seems to have loved him. It is a bit hard to find objective facts about this, since his biographer was also his disciple. But for that same reason we can be quite sure about his views on ritual and rules, because this was about a millennium before it became trendy to denounce these kind of things.

Extremely regular readers may believe that I knew all about St Symeon beforehand, or even that I shared his experiences to some degree. Certainly the description of The Light in my “Servants of the Light” fiction is disturbingly Symeonitic. But such things don’t really surprise me anymore. The undeserved Presence in my heart is pretty clear on this topic, although it rarely ever reaches the level of actual vision, like a hallucination.

I guess technically it would qualify as a hallucination as long as other people don’t see it too. It is my belief that voluntary hallucination is not necessarily a sign of mental illness. Indeed, Symeon and several others who had really strange visions (or heard voices, or felt intense heat etc) were capable of more coherent thought than their contemporaries, elaborating on their teachings in a systematic way, as well as writing poetry, organizing large numbers of people, and predicting future events with some degree of accuracy. So while these people certainly had a different function of the mind, it can hardly be called dysfunctional. Rather, one could argue that they were MORE sane than the common person.

In fact, if we accept the childish definition that a hallucination is seeing something that isn’t there, then it could be argued that Symeon was the one who had it right, and we who see a world without the Light are hallucinating. The Light is certainly present in the world, of this I have no doubt, nor do any of the great world religions.

Whether this higher level of sanity also applies to me is more doubtful. But if I live long enough, it would seem that my life is stumbling in this direction. And I suppose I may still literally see the Light, although that is not guaranteed unless I become pure of heart. That is still a bit off, to say it delicately.

and the one who died upon the cross, well he is the One for me.
And he says: Come with me and you will see
the Light that shines for eternity...

 

Water inside

The handle is inside the panel to the right – pull the knob to get to it.

I woke up and as I passed through the kitchen on my way to the bathroom, I heard a strange noise. It turned out one of the faucets in the bathroom had bust wide open during the night. It was one to a wash basin I don’t actually use, although I had some dirty clothes lying there that I had not washed yet. Well, they got wet at least! The water pressure was quite impressive.

Being the rational adult that I am, I decided to turn off the main water intake. When I moved in, it had been pointed out to me. Unfortunately, what I thought was the handle for the main water intake was the handle for the firehose. The landlord had to send someone to turn off the water for me. He also sent a plumber, later. I went to work and the plumber did an excellent job in my absence, nor am I missing anything from the house. So I guess not all people are thieves. It would have been kind of conspicuous, I guess, but still. Temptations have shown me that they are worthy adversaries. Anyway, it ended well.

The bathroom is quite water-resistant too, so I expect few if any long-term problems from this.

Kristi requested a picture of the firehose, thus the choice of topic for today. I am not sure what firehose is called in modern English, if you even have them in modern England. Both my Android tablet my Opera spell checker think I mean “firehouse”, but I don’t, and I sincerely hope the phrase will never be connected to this or any other place where I live.

 

On the road again…

Or at least the bike / pedestrian path that is found alongside all major roads here in Mandal. Yesterday and today I was out walking again, feeling pretty much the same as before the heart race episode. I burned over 800 calories each walk, so all in all it was a good day! :p

I still don’t know what happened, but the jolts and “glitches” of the heartbeat that I have felt off and on lately seem to have faded for this time. I wonder if these aren’t in some way related to the heart racing. In any case, I try to pay more attention to how I feel and not press myself too far.

It is not like I am looking to lose X pounds per week, or am training for a marathon.  I simply want to keep the diabetes at a safe distance and show my body that yes, it is still inhabited.

Plus, walking is a great opportunity to think, or be inspired, or just be. Sometimes it is good to not have an agenda or anything to, but just watch the land as I walk through it.

City of Heroes Freedom

A mastermind doing the Midnighter arc in Steel Canyon! Once unthinkable, this is a quite ordinary sight now. Whether you become a hero or a villain now depends on your own moral choices, not what powers you have. The spiral swirls around Happy Scientist is his time warping powers, a new powerset in CoH Freedom.

Regular readers will probably remember the name City of Heroes – it is one of the few computer games I still play, and I played it probably every week (holidays and vacations included) for over 7 years, from it was in closed beta and until this summer. With the announcement that the game was going to change drastically, I started to lose interest. It seems I was mistaken though.

I must admit I was skeptical when NCSoft announced that the 7 year old online superhero game was going to become free to play, under the name City of Heroes: Freedom. There is no such thing as a free lunch, as the saying goes: Somebody always pays, and in any kind of commerce, that somebody is always the customer.

The transition has recently begun, starting with us regular subscribers. We are now called VIP players. When we logged on after the new major update, we could pretty much continue doing whatever we had done before. One little-used newbie city zone has been taken for use as a new tutorial. On the other hand, a new level 20+ zone has been opened. And we now have a brand new server. Just in case 12 character slots on 13 English-language servers were not enough… The point of the new server is that when the free players arrive, we will have an exclusive gathering place for the “elite”, making us feel exclusive. And of course, it is a new start, where every character is new for a few weeks.

In addition to the usual content, we get part of our payment converted into “points”, which can be used to buy such things as rare auras or costume pieces. Perhaps the most controversial decision was to let one of the two new power sets only be available for points. Since subscribers get points as part of the package, they can buy this Beam Rifle power without pulling out their credit card again – if they don’t prefer spending the points on other goodies. But usually all main powers are directly opened to subscribers. This is also the case with the other power set in this issue, Time Manipulation.

While little has changed for the subscribers – we have a new server and some new shiny stuff – the big winners are the former subscribers who for various reasons have wandered off. These have now “Premium” status. Their accounts are activated again for free. All their characters are mothballed, but they can play a number of them depending on how long they were customers. They keep rewards and mini-expansions they bought before. They can’t play as Incarnates, wielding even more power than usual heroes, but that is beyond what was recently the endgame anyway. There is certainly a lot to come back to – the game keeps growing. And you can still buy the new extras.

The third group is those who haven’t played before and don’t plan to subscribe. They get to make only two characters  in total (unless they pay for more character slots), and won’t have shiny stuff (unless they pay for it). But it is “Free to play. Forever.” as the slogan says. Obviously it is not actually forever. Eternity is forever. But if you want to hang out with us heroes (or the despicable villains, but then you wouldn’t be reading this website, right?) for free, you can do it now. Enjoy your flight – or your superspeed, if you so desire!

 

The body’s dual fuel economy

For the duration of this essay, we shall assume that eating and exercising are separate activities. If you run a marathon, adding carbohydrates may be a good idea; if you run for the bus, probably not so much.

Since understanding these things is becoming a matter of life or death, I tend to pick it up wherever I find it. And since it affects millions and millions of fellow earthlings, I should probably share it. Let us talk about exercise and body fat.

I read an article in the Norwegian business daily DN. They have a popular section on health and fitness. Businesspeople need to stay in shape, they don’t get it as part of their job. This article said to forget pulse watches and such, and talk instead. If you could (just barely) lead a normal conversation or recite a familiar text, you had the ideal speed for burning fat. Faster than that, and the body switches to burning carbs instead.

This is correct, in the sense that fat is a much more complex form of molecule and takes longer time and more oxygen to burn. Therefore when you exert yourself, your body resorts to sugar, which is what all carbs come down to eventually. Sugar is simpler and burns faster and easier. And unlike fat, you can get energy from glucose without enough oxygen. There is an enzyme that can split glucose and release part of the energy directly. The result is lactic acid, which is then burned later when you get enough oxygen.

(Until recently it was believed that lactic acid built up in the muscles and was the reason why people got stiff and sore after exercise. This is no longer considered a fact. It seems lactic acid is harmless in the levels found during and after exercise. It also leaks easily into the blood and is greedily accepted by other cells who burn it for food or restore it to glucose for later use.)

So it is true that you burn the most fat while you are still breathing freely enough to talk.  But there is a difference between “nothing but the truth” and “the whole truth”. Other authorities urge you to press yourself harder. After all, this carb burning may be faster, but it is less efficient. When you run, you spend a lot more energy than when you walk: Not just per minute, but also per mile. Running is not energy-efficient. And fat is stored energy. If you spend more energy than you eat, no matter how, you will lose weight.

To explain this, we have to look at the body’s use of energy. It actually has two separate but overlapping “economies”. Carbs are fast energy and can be compared to cash, while fat is slower and can be compared to putting money in the bank. Just like most of us carry a little cash on us, the body stores enough carbs for about a day of normal activity without eating. So in theory you only need to eat every other day! But your stomach probably disagrees with this; mine certainly does. Still, there are people who live this way. They are generally in good health and tend to age more slowly, or so they say. (Controlled studies show more varied results.) Whether they are able to concentrate on their work while their stomach is busy faking its own death, I do not know. You may want to ask them.

Since most of us eat every day, many times a day, it is common that our carbohydrate storage fills up and actually overflows. In this case, the body burns carbs first and the fat you eat goes straight at your belly for use in the next famine. If there are still leftover carbs, fat cells try to convert it into fat. However, humans suck at this, and much of the energy is lost in the process. (Well, technically energy cannot be lost. It is spread in your body as heat. So you may want to try a sugar rush during the arctic winter.)

One exception is fructose, a sugar that can be converted to fat in the liver with very little loss. It is a common ingredient in sweets and soft drinks in the USA, but in the rest of the world it is rarely found except in honey, which we probably get less of than we should. In the USA, negative publicity has caused many suppliers to illegally rename their product “corn sugar”. So if you buy something that contains “corn sugar”, you can assume that 1) it will end up as fat if you eat it, and 2) it comes from liars with a bad conscience.  However, if you swear to a high-fat diet, fructose is probably the closest you come to fat while still tasting sweet.

Now instead of fasting every other day, you may decide to work out instead. Let’s say you are not an athlete and so you just go for a brisk walk. In the beginning, your body will mostly burn sugar, because there is already too much of it. During the first part of your walk, your pulse will probably be lower. But after a while your blood sugar will fall slightly, and your pancreas will make glucagon,  the “anti-insulin”. Just as insulin told your body to stow away sugar from the blood and store it first in your muscles and then as fat, it now says the opposite: The liver puts more sugar into the bloodstream, and muscles burn fat in addition to spending their own carbs storage (glycogen – why do they make the names so similar?).

Now while merrily you stroll along, your body is burning both sugar and fat. (Actually it always does, but the fat is only a small part if there is plenty of sugar.)  Now you can either keep walking, or start running.

If you have limited time, running is the obvious answer. You spend a lot more energy that way in the same time. So what if most of it is carbohydrate? That just means your muscles and liver will be reasonably empty even if you have not fasted for a day. So the next time you eat carbs (bread, pasta, rice, cane sugar etc) your body will be busy restocking its glycogen reserves, while using fat as fuel. Instead of the other way around, as it used to be. You still lose weight in the long run, and this probably makes you happy if you have read this far. (There are people who don’t need to lose weight. They are probably doing something else by now.)

But if you have plenty of time, continuing to walk may be more pleasant, and therefore you are more likely to do it again. People, like amoebas, tend to withdraw from what causes pain and stretch toward what gives pleasure. And usually – unless you are really dedicated to your food – you are at least not eating while you walk. So that’s something. ^_^

The thing is, you can keep going much longer when you pace yourself. Muscles can only store so much glycogen (although it improves with regular training). When they begin to run out, you “hit the wall”. Think of it as suddenly having just one engine instead of two. You used to have sugar and fat to fuel your muscles, but suddenly there is only the fat engine running, and that is the slow one. You won’t die (unless you have some preexisting condition) but your body will no longer be able to respond to your will. Even if you tell it to run, it will at best be able to walk, and even that reluctantly. This is a quite unpleasant experience, apart from the stiffness and soreness that you anyway get after pressing yourself. So not motivating.

Therefore, I recommend pacing yourself if you have plenty of time, but racing yourself if you have little time and no heart or lung problems.

I hope you now see how people can have two opposite opinions on this matter and both be right! This is actually something that happens often in this world, and causes conflict or at least discord. By knowing more, understanding more and seeing the whole from a higher perspective, you can overcome this source of conflict and experience harmony and happiness.  ^_^

 

 

Perfectly imperfect world

I still suck at kanji, so I have no idea whether the painted words are in any way related to the romaji and the corresponding English text. I hope they are decent, at least they are pretty. Anyway, my destination lies beyond, and for good reason.

The llama touched on this recently, so perhaps I should describe it in more detail.

I know I have written in great detail about this before, after listening to the voice in my heart. But I have probably not uploaded it, because I am not really a person fit to teach. I am a guy who gets up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats, plays computer games or reads or writes or watches a cartoon, and goes to bed. Oh, and walks an hour usually. But the sacrifices I have made for the Truth are so few and so small as to be negligible. That is why one should not take on faith anything I say about more important things.  Try it against your own conscience, and/or learn from the great guiding lights of the past.

But I think this is self-evident, that Earth is not Heaven, and world is not God. Or rather, Earth is not fully Heaven, at best a pale reflection. And our world is not God in the fullness of perfection and completeness, the Sum of All Good etc.

I am not simply talking about a specific religion here, although I have one. Rather, I think all of us have some idea of perfection, some idea of completeness, some idea of the Highest Good. Since some things are more worth than others, there must be something of the highest worth. Since some things are more real than others, there must be a supreme reality. The ancient form of the pyramid represents the great chain of being, with the One at the top, from which all flows and to which all leads. The Great Pyramid was supposedly in its heyday covered in white stone, but its peak plated in gold.

Now, we must understand that this world is not a direct manifestation of the Supreme Being, of the Perfect and Unlimited. Rather, there is a distance between the two. This world follows laws of nature, but there also seems to be much randomness. And so also with the hearts of men. Though we have principles, it is hard to hold onto them in the face of temptation. Others also have this struggle, so we should meet them with understanding when they try to do their best but sometimes fail.

The natural world itself seems to contain this measure of randomness. Things happen for a reason, but only in light of the transcendent (that which goes beyond). If seen with the eyes of plain matter, there is a lot of randomness. Why do bad things happen to good people? More importantly, why do good people happen to do bad things? Why these fluctuation, in matter and in human will? Why the imperfections, the failures?

I say it is because the world is not God or even Heaven, and is not meant to be so. God – or the Uncreated Light, or the Tao – has granted us space so that we could exercise our free will. If it were not so, we would not be here to talk about it.

Think of a brightly shining light bulb. In the night, it shines brightly. But if we could somehow place this glowing bulb inside the sun, it would actually there be a darker, colder place than its surroundings. It would also very quickly cease to exist.

In the same way, even the most luminous among us – the wisest, the purest, the most worthy – would become an impurity if God were to manifest fully in this world, if God were to take direct control in an obvious way. And because “God is light and there is no darkness in him” (to use a phrase from the New Testament) we would not even be able to exist in such a situation.

We live in this imperfect world because it is the only place fit for imperfect people like us. “God alone is great and perfect.”

However, unlike the rest of nature, man (and this includes woman, of course) can change. It is not easy. You cannot simply sit up one day and decide: “From now on I will not give in to temptation. From now on I will do the right thing every time as far as I can see.” Well, actually you can, perhaps even should. But you cannot carry it through. As a man you simply don’t have that kind of backbone. You are subject to imperfection, to fluctuations, you become tired in your morality much as you become tired in your mind and tired in your body. Certainly I do not wish to hold you back if you want to live a perfect life. Go for it! But don’t kill yourself when you crash.

Gradually – at a snail’s pace for most of us, and that is being generous – we can change. There is what religious people call “grace”, a kind of invisible flow of opportunity (or more poetically “helping hand”) from above. It is not always equally palpable, equally possible to sense and identify. But at some point there should be a small crack in the cosmic eggshell that surrounds us, and that’s how the light gets in. At some point we should be able to find a small stream of grace and follow it, sensing somehow when we begin to get too far away from it, or when it is closer at hand.

Various religions have techniques for finding and making use of such opportunities of grace. If you mistrust them all, I suppose you can try to make it on your own, but I recommend you learn the basics at least from those who have trod this path before you.

The idea is that we can get closer to Heaven while here on Earth. That we can become less random, less an object tossed around by fate and more a living being with its own destiny.  Our destiny lies beyond this world and its randomness. When the world is random toward us, we need not respond to it randomly, but the compass needle of our mind can come to point more and more in the direction of Heaven.

But won’t that lead us to becoming engulfed by God and cease to exist? Not in this yuga (lifetime of the universe) it won’t. Such complete unification is the point at the tip of the pyramid. It is certainly not something we need to worry about. If the time comes for all to become One, we will be fully prepared for it and even eager for it. Not until then. Divine Love does not force itself upon the unwilling soul. You can get to know this by experience.

 

 

These boots are made for…

Having skipped the afternoon walk yesterday (the day after the heart episode) and tanked up on carbs, I took a 55 minute walk today. The pulse was very low for the first 35 minutes, and it never started racing this time, but I also didn’t provoke it once it rose past 120 after about 35 minutes. I am still a bit wary, as you may imagine.

During the 55 minutes, someone removed the 5 days old rubber boots I had left standing near the front door. It has been raining cats and dogs most of the summer and fall so far, so I am sure they can come in handy.  The street is not really a thoroughfare, there is no reason to drive it if you don’t live nearby. So I must assume one of the neighbors has appropriated the boots, after seeing that I left the building. It would be kind of suspicious to stop a car outside a house to steal something unless one already knew nobody was home. So yeah, it seems this is the kind of neighbors I have now. A bit of a change from living in the countryside.

Ironically, I only bought the boots to walk around the house. Because I had somehow lost the key to the front door (presumably inside, since I locked myself in with it), I had to use the back door. Unfortunately, the grass in the garden is higher than my jogging shoes and teeming with ticks. I am not sure there is even one day I have walked through it in my jogging shoes and not found a tick drinking my blood a few hours later. That is where the rubber boots come in. Ticks here on the south coast harbor three potentially life-threatening diseases, so I try to avoid them.

But today the family upstairs handed back their keys, and I got one of them from the landlord, so I no longer need the boots. Not that my neighbors could know that, may God have mercy on their souls. I just hope they can resist the temptation to break the windows in the back yard and empty the house while I am at work. Probably they can. It takes just a moment’s weakness to swipe a pair of good boots, but at least a minute’s weakness to actually break in.

In any case, I would not leave stuff outside if I couldn’t afford to lose it. This is pretty much what I expect from neurotypical humans*. Still, it takes a bit of courage to nab things in broad daylight in a place that is visible from three or four houses.

(*I don’t mean to say that all ordinary people are thieves. Rather, that there is a randomness in us humans, as there also is in the rest of nature. If you expose a number of people to temptation for an increasing time, the likelihood rises that someone will break and fall for it. The risk varies with the temptation, but small and inconsequential temptations usually don’t take many people or a long time. There is, as I said, a randomness, a fluctuation in the human mind, so that it acts in part like a part of nature. And nature is not moral, it is seemingly random. When a stone is loose in the mountainside, it will eventually fall, unheeding of who may be passing beneath it.)

Anyway, now that I unexpectedly have my key, the boots would just have become one more  part of the heavy load I carry with me from one house to the next every time I move. Someone up there is still looking out for me, it seems. ^_^ Of course, that would be the case even if I did not see it, but it is still nice to see it.

 

A day later

My pulse improved gradually and was fine in the morning. I went to work (an hour late) but skipped the afternoon walking hour. Stayed home and tanked up on carbs. ^_^ I remember how in 2005, when I had at least two such episodes like yesterday, it was also in a phase when I was walking a lot and losing weight. I am not sure that is a coincidence, since that has really not happened since. Until now.

Well, I am not a doctor and not playing one on TV. I just want you to know that I didn’t die that night at least!

And if I die before I wake, the Buddha and Confusius and Lao-Tzu are all a very easy read if you find a good translation. ^_^ But to quote the double-edged Irish songwriter Chris de Burgh:

We must show respect for all the rest and what a man believes;
and the one who died upon the cross, well he is the One for me.
And he says:  Come with me and you will see
the Light that shines for eternity.
Be strong and learn to say the words ‘I love you’!

And this endless road that we are on just keeps on going ’round
but there’s one destination that always is here to be found –
so come with me and you will see
the Light that shines for eternity.
Be strong and learn to say the words ‘I love you’.