Thoughts and Tuxedos

        To date, this blog has been a compiling of more formal written works.  Polished.  Edited.  Re-drafted.  I think I'm going to try to change the the flavor of it all.  And this is difficult for me.  It's easy to be polished, isn't it?  To present well, to be not only competent, but excellent.  Back in Walla Walla, a theology professor as gnarled and thoughtful as an old oak tree, dropped an five-minute thought on my classmates one day--to have the courage to be mediocre.  And the thought rang true in my life experience.  How often am I concerned with appearances and performance, to the exclusion of living life in this moment?  I'd like to live now, here, in this moment, and be a bit less wrapped up in damage-control, what if's, the whirlwind of possible misunderstandings.

        I do like completed thoughts.  I like how they grow and mature into powerful new understandings and perspectives.  I like how they begin to fit, to sync, to click-in with the other puzzle pieces of my worldview, and I like being conscious of these connections.  Yet how vibrant life is, it's colors spinning all around me in such a way that I find I am ever only improvising in this moment--this moment that happens once.  Life seems rather informal in that way, how we all are thrust into the present.  So perhaps my ideas should enter this dance as well, and leave the tuxedo behind so that these thoughts of mine can dash through streets, jump in puddles, and risk being identified as everyday.  I'd rather be a street philosopher, with dirt under my fingernails, wet shoes from the puddles, and full lungs from dashing about and dodging cars and accidentally running into people and tripping over my own two feet.

Yes.  Tripping.  I'm excited about this, about tripping.

I'm going to go do a bit of that now, for it's rather late.