It Ain't Easy Being Mahayana

Wasn't that what Kermit really meant?

Ah...probably not.  Maybe.  I don't know.  It could be that our little green frog friend was more prescient than he knew.  I was singing that song recently, but 'green' wasn't the word that I was looking for during my day.  The world, it seems, wants too much from me and I don't know if I can maintain my composure.

It may have been the cars on the road what made me think it.

Events in my life over the past decade have changed me, at least a little.  I have striven to be more patient, tolerant, understanding and compassionate.  The increase in this learning rate jumped when my daughter was born, and then increased sharply within the last three years.

But, still, I gripe.  I curse.  I question the motives and intelligence of my fellow human beings on a far too regular basis.  I cannot seem to break the habit.  This troubles me, because to maintain the cynicism and 'worldiness' that passes for social aptitude in this modern world is increasingly beyond my pale.  I can do it.  But it degrades me and exhausts me.

I know because of the irritation I feel at the idiocy I witness on the road, the overbearing demands of a service oriented industry (in which service sometimes is confused with 'servitude'), the numbing over stimulation of a 24/7 news/entertainment complex, the sheer restlessness of highly populated areas always under construction...

Increasingly I feel disconnected from that modern life, because of the crassness, vapidity and anxiety it cannot seem to do without.

Gah.  Look what I have written.  Sometimes, dear readers, I see my words, know them to be a reflection of my mind, and I cannot escape the notion that I am a foolish man.  Foolish, maybe, because I expect the world to be something other than what it is.  If only, if only, I could tell you what it should be.

Then, perhaps, enlightenment would be close behind.