Not a post about Terminator, I'm sorry.
More a post about termination, the terminus, and the terminal.
The semester is over, and I cannot stop judging it. I feel this semester I was terribly incompitent. I let myself get distracted and did not attend to the work, the people, the human beings around me who were placed in my life.
My questions were not sharp, and my answers came too quickly.
I was very much like the people who fund and support these trucks and their message. "If I can just make it to that day," I thought, "Everything will be settled. I will be happy. All will be solved."
Well, here is that day, and I would like nothing more than to go back and have another go with these people. But that can't be done. Suffering, suffering. I create Judgement Day and its required hell, punishment, and grief.
Attitudes like the one that funds this sort of message (the truck message) is a distraction from an atttiude that, while definitionally secular in many senses, is the beating heart of religion - attend to the moments of your life as they come, and only as they come.
Worrying or planning for a day of attonement (even if not as extreme as these folks make it out to be) can distract you from the attonement of this moment, and this one, and myriad millions of instances which for convenience and to keep ourselves sane we call "our life."
Attending to our lives and not an imaginary day to come insures that we all fall into grace and pass our judgement day - the question is: Who are you and where are you right now? If you can answer that, if you can attend to that, I think you are on your way to avoiding hell.
Why do I not attend to right now and write about these feelings? Why do I sit, eating an orange, and play my Obi-Wan semester back in my head again and again? One can't clean up without picking up what's immediately around her.
The semester is over, this cannot be changed. It will never come around again. The students will not have another teacher, nor another go at that class. All of this can be mourned or it can be accepted as it is. Terminus does not mean terminal. Today: There are clouds; the leaves dance in the breeze. I examine articles for my summer course. Judgement day, right now, always right now. Always right here.
