Random Musings. . .by Kui Gathua

  " Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out. " ~Mitch Albom I like to keep time because I believe it shows that I respect the other person’s time and I keep my word. I hate to be kept waiting, especially when the time was set by the party that is now late. It tells me they did not respect their word and time, and now they are disrespecting my time. But in some cases we have no option but to wait, and we do because we have no alternative. Waiting is not the issue as much as how y...

    “ Sometimes when things are way too big and I can’t control it, I do sort of a weird thing where I kind of check out a little bit . It’s all about self-preservation for me .” ~Hoda Kotb There are still a little over 130 days to go to the end of this year but it already feels like it’s been 2 for the price of one! See that picture? Yes, it feels like life is pulling in all directions at all times and someone forgot to include breaks in between the mayhem. . . Help! Life is happening on a mega scale like never before and it’s leaving a lot of casualties in its wake. Some people are breaking down and remaining down, others are only down for a time then they rise resilient and move on. But I’m none of those. I feel like some part of me went into an out of body experience and my guide forgot to bring me back. Otherwise defined as emotional numbness. Every living being has a natural or instinctive tendency to act so as to preserve its own existence. It’s the reason that st...

  “ We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world – the company of those who have known suffering .”~Hellen Keller For the second week in a row, I spent Wednesday attending a memorial service. I have attended more of those this year than I had for all my previous years combined! Yes, death is on a harvest spree among us and we who are left have to live with grief and loss and pain. Not all of us learn how to cope with the pain of loss. For some, they fixate on the pain and it becomes their ever present reality. Others seek ways to numb the pain and end up in addictions that temporarily numb their un-dealt with pain. Kahlil Gibran had an interesting perspective on death, as recorded in The Prophet: For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered? Only when you drink from...

This week I attended a funeral service where the preacher spoke about evaluating our relationship or belief about God based on the outcomes in our life, and not the process he uses to get us there. It is a recurring theme in scripture but we continually lose our faith and belief in God based solely on our evaluation criteria. And recently, a lot of people have publicly denounced their faith based on what I consider to be their impatience with the process or dislike of the outcomes, and sometimes a misunderstanding of which is the process and which is the outcome. A process is defined as a series of outcomes directed to some end. An outcome, in contrast, is the end result. We experience life in the span of processes and outcomes and it is these that help us draw up our individual philosophy of life, how we see things, what we believe about things and people, and eventually what we do or not do. The preacher’s sermon was based on John chapter 11 and 12; the story of Lazarus’ death...