Risk

Adventure: an enterprise involving risk. Yesterday's post met that description. The night before, Thursday, when I sat down after coming home from my evening class and having had something to eat, I found I had nothing to say, or rather some big, ungainly themes without concrete handles.

The risk began earlier when I blithely contemplated the evening's posting task with a complacent 'something will turn up.' No ideas, no problem. Actually, not no ideas, but none that said 'Me, I'm what you want to explore.' Even as the class was going on and people were working in groups that functioned on their own, and I cast my mind briefly to the evening, I wasn't concerned. Just relax, I said to myself, and open up. After all, the premise of this blog is that life is prolific in encounters which can be reflected on.

Given my self-imposed commitment to post something every day, and the fact that there would be no time the next day to really work on anything, I had put myself into a do-or-die deadline situation. I kind of like the risk.

In front of the white screen, with an white screen mental equivalent, I felt only the smallest tickle of panic. My readings in a book on philosophy and religion must offer something to. The theme of adventure has some energy. The thing is though is that, as such, they are not encounters, there's no time or place, no experience, no I/you. The best that can happen is an argument.

Ah, a tomato. So early in the season! and so welcome! At last, a stirring within not just my mind. The way garden tomatoes surprise me anew every year with their deliciousness. Two surprises, not unprecedented but not inauthentic either. So as to my encounter with God-in-love as informed by the discussion in the philosophy book, I felt that, as far as I had read, the author had made point after point that pertained. But had I reached a key point in the argument, a no-farther-forward conclusion, or a turning point, a no-longer-in-this-direction shift?  Or was I at the point where, like a climber on a rock face, the author had to shift his weight and stretch a little past balance to grasp the rocky knob that would be his next grip.

As I tried to stitch these pieces into a intelligible-enough quilt to serve as a post, I found myself in a maze of questions about what exactly in what'd written was what I really wanted to say. I questioned what the connection was in terms of real experience between a tomato and God-in-love. Part of the adventure was coping with the waves of the sense of absurdity that swept over me. Yet I felt something was there to be expressed, however awkwardly.

Risks are not all corporeal, financial, existential. Failure to fulfill is the one I played with Thursday night and, even with tweaks Friday between classes, it's one I 'm not sure I've in fact avoided. The topic of Experience and God is something I want to revisit because it's at the heart of the adventure I'm on trying to live the God-in-love presence/adventure/lastingness way of life.

Last night at the Vokes Theater, we watched Mark Twain's farce 'Is He Dead?' which like all such is about absurd risks and improbably escapes--hilarious! Part of what makes it fun is our recognition of risk of farcicality in our lives and most serious enterprises. Well, it's worth taking.