On Monday we leave for another year in Japan. I usually love these returns, but this time the assignment is somewhat tougher. We have a new baby. We are tired. The school is struggling to keep its head above the proverbial. I find that my usual limitless energy is flagging. So too the sunny outlook.
On the other hand, every change to circumstances presents another opportunity somewhere. Somehow. It will be struggle to be alert and on-task after a sleepless night. On the other hand the very act of raising a family in a foreign land presents, perhaps, endless possibilities for moving ahead with life.
What a strange project life is! So planned yet utterly unplanned. We set our sights on certainties that we have no right to, their very solidity blasted away by the first setback or shock or disaster. And the funny thing is, everything is in some way foreseeable, not clairvoyantly, but logically. Of course people must die, even those close to us! Some will die bizarely, unfairly. Yes, that's always been the case. Fortunes are made and lost on hardwork or bad luck or just plain stupidity. We all get sick at some stage, some worse than others. People lie to us or talk behind our backs. Why does it come as such a surprise? Why should the intrusion of personal fate be so startling? How is it we exclude ourselves from inevitability of suffering until it actually claims us?
Do I have any idea? Not at all. Perhaps that the meaning of religion, in its most pure sense. To make some sense.
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