The Alternative

During one of those periodic episodes of shared, philosophical introspection that often follows times of tragedy, the populous of one area engaged in a conversation thusly:

First village voice:  “All that keeps me going are my religious beliefs.”
And a Second voice contributed:  “What keeps me going are my many social and personal  responsibilities.”
And a Third voice-of-the-village added:  “The only thing that keeps me going is in considering the alternative.”
And a certain rebellious based voice near the outskirts noted:  “Ah, but what keeps the adventurous going is their awareness of the alternative to all alternatives.”

There is a place, over in a faster time zone, where a myth is not a noun.

One pleasantly grizzled gentleman, to me confided the following, “Whilst being a human here in this life, I must confess, I never truly grasped the nature of compassion until I was well into my sixties, and by then, I didn’t really gave a damn.”  (When your hearing is more complex, it sometimes surprises how dissonant the chorus can be from the verse.)

Ordinary thought is to This, as love is to lust, as foreplay is to the transcendental quiet of the death-nap afterwards.

In this one place, they have a saying that goes, “Society should serve man, not man society.”  Now what if you tripled the stakes, and changed the game so that instead of the units, “society” and “man,” you had “Life” and the “Revolutionist?”

J.