{"id":5641,"date":"2013-04-26T07:46:12","date_gmt":"2013-04-26T11:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=5641"},"modified":"2013-04-26T07:46:12","modified_gmt":"2013-04-26T11:46:12","slug":"a-rainy-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/a-rainy-day\/","title":{"rendered":"A Rainy Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is a brooding, gray, rainy day. The house is quieter now than I can ever remember it. I feel older today. I&#8217;m tired. I&#8217;m pensive and anxious and I don&#8217;t know why. I&#8217;m feeling down today. It&#8217;s unusual for me to feel this way, still when it happens, I enjoy it. I enjoy feeling this way. Isn&#8217;t that odd? I&#8217;m usually feeling up, happy and healthy. I normally feel so healthy I don&#8217;t give my health a thought. I suppose most healthy people are like that. I am thankful that I am usually healthy, and painfully aware that many are not. So, I am happy and thankful that my ill-feeling today is not normal.<\/p>\n<p>Today I feel half-sick and sad. I&#8217;m down. And, as strange as it sounds, it feels good to me to feel something else besides the way I normally feel. I wouldn&#8217;t want to feel sick; but this in-between feeling of half-sick is actually comforting. It reminds me, that I am mortal and time is not something that should be wasted. I waste a lot of time. I waste time waiting for things to happen, things to come, things to go, mail to come, and that sort of thing. Sometimes, I waste time like I had an endless supply of it. Today reminds me that I don&#8217;t and then again, maybe I have more time to waste than I think. That&#8217;s what I love about my mood today, it is fertile soil for thought. All I need is a little coffee to water the soil.<\/p>\n<p>It occurred to me, in this morose mood of mine, that all diseases must begin as simple symptoms; maybe an ache here or there, maybe a twinge of pain; maybe just a tired, lethargic feeling &#8211; that one I can&#8217;t precisely describe. I think I would ignore most symptoms for awhile, especially if I had had the same symptoms before. I guess the people that run to the doctor at every ill feeling, are more in tune with their bodies than I &#8211; or maybe they&#8217;re just more afraid of dying than I. Don&#8217;t get me wrong, I don&#8217;t want to die. Although when I think about it, I imagine death is more for the living than the dead. The dead don&#8217;t really care if they are not alive, do you think? Besides if anyone ever reads this when I&#8217;m dead they&#8217;ll be wondering, won&#8217;t they?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve often thought that before I was born, human history progressed just fine without me. I read about Shakespeare&#8217;s life. He lived long before I was born. I don&#8217;t actually know that there was a Shakespeare. I have to take people&#8217;s word for it. I don&#8217;t know that he really did all those things. I wasn&#8217;t around to see him do them. Someone wrote Hamlet. They said it was Shakespeare, but I wasn&#8217;t there to actually see him laboring over it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve read about the great conquests of Alexander The Great. And through the written history I can experience it. In my own way, which would certainly be different than yours. But I sure wasn&#8217;t on this earth when Alexander The Great was conquering and vanquishing his enemies.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m pretty sure that when I die the world will continue spinning &#8217;round and &#8217;round and history will be made without me. Then I wonder if I&#8217;ve always been here? Maybe a caveman; then maybe a slave; then perhaps I helped construct the great pyramids. Maybe a little later I was a Roman Centurion; then sailed on the Mayflower to begin a life adventure in a new world&#8217; then a pioneer on a wagon train to the wild West. Maybe then I was a dough boy in WWI. If I was any of these before, I don&#8217;t remember it. And that intrigues me. It&#8217;s a good thing that I don&#8217;t remember being here before. It would be a complicated mess if all our different lives overlapped. After a few hundred centuries we&#8217;d be a mess of conflicting ideologies. We&#8217;d be bombarded by so many memories that our minds would be overcome and we wouldn&#8217;t be able to function. I think it&#8217;s good, that if we go around and around in cycles of lifetimes that we always start the next life with a clean slate. We can learn &#8220;new&#8221; things for the five-hundredth time, all over again and maybe learn it better this time around. If we don&#8217;t learn it well this time; we&#8217;ll try again next time. Eventually, we get it right &#8211; I think.<\/p>\n<p>So, I guess I believe whatever is inside of us that makes &#8220;me&#8221; me, and &#8220;you&#8221; you; that energy, that awareness we feel, never dies. It just comes and goes in a never-ending cycle of life. Each time we&#8217;re born, we are born as a different person, and then only thing we have left from previous lifetimes it that sense of self. Who can say I&#8217;m not right? Maybe God is the animator and is that &#8220;me&#8221; or &#8220;you&#8221; inside us that lives and dies and lives and dies forever. Maybe there is just one glorious life and we all share a piece of it &#8211; you, me, the trees, the flowers, the animals. All life is the same when you get to the essence of it. Isn&#8217;t it? That spark of life that makes a tiger alive isn&#8217;t in a rock or other non-living thing. Where does the energy of life go when we die? It can&#8217;t be destroyed or created. It just is. It is and will be forever. God has no beginning and no ending. Maybe God is everything and everything is God?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not espousing religiously &#8211; or questioning my beliefs. I&#8217;m not going off on a transcendental quest. It&#8217;s just me musing on a cold, dark, November day. I love drifting along with my thoughts as the rain pounds on the windows. Gray, dreary skies and the gloomy, slanted light of November make for great thinking. Sometimes it&#8217;s good to feel down and pensive. I wallow in it and enjoy it. I can even enjoy the feeling of being almost-but-not-quite-sick, a little. Feeling this way motivates me to contemplate my own mortality. That is not such a bad thing, after all.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t take enough time to think about these kinds of things when I&#8217;m happy and feeling good &#8211; and going about my daily life, buzzing busily around as I normally do. I waste too much time most of the time I think. But maybe I have more time than I think I do? Maybe I have an eternity of it?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what to think. I just know that today was a good day for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is a brooding, gray, rainy day. The house is quieter now than I can ever remember it. I feel older today. I&#8217;m tired. I&#8217;m pensive and anxious and I don&#8217;t know why. I&#8217;m feeling down today. It&#8217;s unusual for me to feel this way, still when it happens, I enjoy it. I enjoy feeling this way. Isn&#8217;t\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/a-rainy-day\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5643,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5641\/revisions\/5643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}