Being retired from profitable employment and residing for the winter on a southern barrier island along the North Atlantic Ocean wouldn’t normally qualify as exertion. Yet I have discovered even from this moil there is the occasional need to take it easy. Unfortunately for me I never have the foresight to predict the want of plain sailing. Instead I behave like a tumbler whose acrobatic talent depends upon sustaining repeated motion. Eventually however I go for a tumble of another order, exhaustion overtakes, sometimes leading to a cascade of apprehension and comprehension. Putting on the brakes isn’t what I willingly accept.  Nor will I say I am determined to “get on my horse and ride off in all directions” but I strangely equate deliverance with productivity. This explains for example why I have never adopted the habit of watching television (though I confess the Seinfeld and Will and Grace series have in later life entertained me fully).

I have tried combining an element of relaxation with reading or following the news.  Indisputably they are both necessary for the proper development of the mind.  But as I do so I am challenged to capture the theses therein arising, to muster an interpretation of modern events within the context of my own life.  Lately that theme has been disheartening in light of the unprovoked attack upon Ukraine by Putin who for some reason has yet escaped the sticky label of a modern day Hitler. Yet sadly these reappearances of dictators and assassins are as much a part of life as life’s many other repetitions. Even the foretelling of science fiction in projects such as Star Wars leads to the same conclusion.

Perhaps one of the greatest inconsistencies of life is chance. It knows no bounds. Though I am reluctant to complain on any account I have to acknowledge that by some extension at least I have endured my own measure of anomaly. Incongruity or eccentricity doesn’t of course entail lack of opportunity or fortune. Indeed I have never considered my own angular distance from the norm as either disruptive or inhibiting (though I am equally certain it no doubt has been in spite of my arrogance). For some however the peril of misfortune is not so capable of either arrogance or ignorance. Those instances of obvious setback can only draw upon our capacity for sympathy, compassion and rapport. In the end the preservation of harmony is a goal which exceeds any individual circumstance.