1. Today, after a several months hiatus, Bill, Val, Diane, Bridgit, Colette, and I beamed ourselves onto one another's computer screens via Zoom and yakked away for a couple of hours.
Together, we are reaching a time in our lives when we are becoming more keenly aware of our mortality.
In part it's because of illness and injury we've experienced. We've all had at least one parent die and the two (I think) surviving parents among us are experiencing declines. We are losing contemporaries to death. All of us seem to realize we either are unable to do things we might like to do or at one time wished we would be able to do (like travel) and Val, in particular, who just returned from a trip to Europe, has more travel planned, aware that she wants to travel as much as she can before the time comes when she might not be able to.
It's sobering, but I thought our conversations about mortality laid a foundation for another discussion we had about compassion and forgiveness. No one ever said this is in so many words, but I wondered if our keener awareness of the inevitability of our lives ending also makes us more keenly aware of wanting to spend the time we have left caring for others, forgiving others, turning away from anger and toward kindness, of realizing more sharply than ever that we'd rather spend whatever time we have left extending compassion, not so much judgment and pettiness.
Maybe what I just wrote wasn't happening for us collectively, but it was for me individually.
2. We all have also moved toward more complicated, complex, and skeptical understandings of the Divine, of Supreme Being in the world. None of us is satisfied with nor is able to live according to the formulas, bromides, and simplistic ways of being in the presence of the Divine that we had been taught when younger or that we observe being experienced by people around us.
And, I thought, don't these questions about the Divine become more pressing to us as we age and become more aware of our mortality?
Not once (that I remember) did our conversation move toward whether there is life after death.
No. All of the discussion about Supreme Being, the Divine, prayer, how we conduct ourselves, what has proven to be impossible to live by spiritually and what we want to align with spiritually had to do with the remaining time we have left in our lives in the here and now.
Every thought articulated today wats fresh, thought out; not one thought was received, recited, or an echoing of an institution or a leader.
I admit.
I didn't say anything.
But I absorbed a lot.
3. On Friday afternoon, Christy joined nearly two dozen of her mates from the KHS Class of 1973 for a chili and soup feed. Seven different members of the class brought a soup or chili (the others brought other kinds of food) and the group voted on whose chili or soup was best.
Christy made Cincinnati chili and served what is often a sauce as chili to eat from a bowl.
Christy didn't win,
She had leftover chili and gave me a container of it and tonight I ate her Cincinnati chili over elbow macaroni.
It was awesome.
Cincinnati chili is much more Greek or Mediterranean in its seasoning than the chili we eat usually and it's not tomato based.
I thought Christy's chili was a perfect blend of the spices that make Cincinnati chili unique and it had a pleasant amount of heat which I enjoyed. I didn't have onion on hand or grated cheese or oyster crackers, so my Cincinnati chili was a beef and beans sauce and I decided to garnish it with Parmesan cheese.
I didn't eat all the chili Christy gave and I'm very happy about that! I look forward to another helping of Christy's chili.
It didn't win the contest at Friday's party, but it is definitely a winner to me!
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