Three Morning Meditations

When I awoke this morning, I found that I had, as usual, a productive night of contemplation while I slept. Three meditations were ready to write, and write I did. Here are the results.

I. On Being

The contemplation of being—its beginning and its ending—rather than being itself, is humanity’s fascination. We exalt its creation with ceremony, and we weave endless tales of its defeat, as if death might be outwitted by story. We fear its ending with such intensity that we grant it more weight than the fact of life itself.

We revere its beginning with awe, we dread its end with terror, yet the middle—being itself—we profane with neglect.

We curse the day, the hour, the minute, for the slightest disappointment or inconvenience, real or imagined; the weather, our companions, our labor. We curse the brevity of joy, the length of sorrow, the depth of our feelings, the complexity of our thoughts, the idleness of time, the busyness of our brow. All that is given becomes a target of our disdain.

Yet here is the paradox: if we are so careless with being itself, why then do we revere its beginning and tremble at its end? Why fear the loss of what we do not value? Why guard so jealously what we daily scorn?

The truth is simple, if difficult: life deserves more than our curses. If we cannot greet each moment with wonder, let us at least receive it with gratitude. If not embrace it as miracle, then with appreciation. If we cannot bless every hour as holy, let us at minimum acknowledge it as gift. For being itself, squandered though it may be, is all we have.

II. On Equality and Power

Men will not endure the scourge of equality with those they deem beneath them. They will sooner suffer the loss of station and status, wealth and power, even willingly and against their own interests, so long as those they despise remain below them. The humiliation of parity weighs heavier than the burden of deprivation.

The clever puppet masters—those who truly govern—have always known this. They stir enmity where alliance might have been, teaching one man to scorn his neighbor, to measure himself not by his own condition but by the imagined inferiority of another. Thus, the poor man may rejoice in the poverty of one poorer still; the dispossessed may take comfort in the greater dispossession of another.

And so men pit themselves blindly against those who should be their allies. They are content to yield treasure and status to the puppet master, provided only that they may stand athwart the “inferior.” Thus do they squander their strength, mistaking themselves for masters of destiny when in truth they are but marionettes in another’s play.

III. On Tears and Salt

There is salt in tears. Salt—the preservative—preserves remembrance. Even sorrow is instructive to heart and soul, for grief keeps memory alive.

So it was with the wife of Lot, who looked back for love of her daughters, lost to the destruction of divine wrath. Preserved in salt, she became remembrance itself: a monument to sorrow, fidelity, and the peril of divided love.

Thus every tear carries its trace of preservation, holding fast what might otherwise be lost: a fragment of love, a lesson of pain, a reminder that sorrow, too, endures as teacher.