Sick, Tired and Weary-ism

I’m growing very weary of certain ISMs in my life....that dividing Greek suffix that forms abstract nouns of action, state, condition, or doctrine.

I’m increasingly tired of actions and processes such as absolutism, asceticism, chauvinism, conservatism, egotism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, hedonism, idealism, obstructionism, racism, radicalism, theism, his-ism and that-ism...just to name a few.

It’s not that I’m against all ISMs in the world, just alot more these days than ever before in my life.

I really don’t have a lot to say about this anti-ism attitude.... and while you’ll think it’s a tangent; I feel like I’m leading up to something: a fundamental change in my way of thinking about the universe. This change in my understanding has been brewing over the past four years and while no single event has instigated this change I can tell you where it started.

It started, as you might expect, when I was drinking a glass of wine in a Vineyard in northeastern

Sharpe Hill, CT

Connecticut four summers ago...I was sitting at the top of Sharpe Hill, looking across the rows of vines and the beautiful cloudless blue skies towards the orchards of Danielson to the east... and I was thinking about life and consciousness...kind of a deep topic to contemplate on a sunny afternoon. I was thinking about what life is...is it the atoms that make up the molecules that compose my body...or any body for that matter?

While organizations such as S.E.T.I. and NASA search for life on Mars and exoplanets, are they looking for carbon or methane based life? Is that was life is...something you can touch? If that’s true riddle me this: what is consciousness? Nobody seems to know, or at least they can’t point to a thing made of molecules and say: THAT thing experiences consciousness.

But, what if consciousness was just a process...similar in a way to the processes of dehydration, hydrolysis, or as with my wine: oxidation.

What if life can’t really be touched...what if life isn’t a thing...but was simply a process that occurs to things, like a flame occurs to a candle.

The more I thought about this, the more it made sense. Life is just a process; and when the candle is extinguished...the process stops, the flame doesn’t go anywhere, it just stops.

There are a lot of “ISMs” in the world that encourage violence, hatred and pain to promote the idea that the flame continues to burn elsewhere. I haven’t quite figured out why this is so, but I do understand that it’s a waste.

Life is short, but it should be long enough...and if what we’re experiencing is a process of life then we must savor it like a fine wine and avoid all of the ISM’s that would cause any harm.

I’m Steve Runner, reminding you to run long and taper.