Who Then Shall I Become?

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you,
pales in comparison to what lies inside you."
- Emerson

Years ago when I was training for a triathlon a friend of mine, who did not like to train, asked;  "What are you going to do with all that fitness?" I didn't really have an answer.

Now that I am settled in the mountains north of Santa Cruz I have begun to prepare for what I am calling The Great In-Between, the interim period that will occur before we all perish. This morning I was thinking back to that encounter with my friend and I started to wonder; what am I going to do with all this preparation?

There are only two people in the world that I love; my daughter and my ex-wife. The preparation is for them but they are both far away and do not think the situation is dire. So if I am preparing to protect people and places I love I will have to do something to convince them and to move them closer. I love where I am living now surrounded by forest and animals and the sounds of nature so I will do what I can to protect this place but that leaves the people I love out in the cold.

I have noticed that once I got out of Los Angeles I started to morph into a different person, a person who feels more deeply connected with the natural world and a person who loves more intensely. It is that which inspired becoming, perhaps, more the person I was meant to be rather than the person who I wanted other people to think I was.

Emerson said that, "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." I have found that it is not the world that is trying to make me someone else, it is me.

I can watch on a daily basis the deterioration of the environment and our lives. I see evidence of the collapse all around me; the dying trees, the decimated animal populations and the gradual but inexorable failure of that, upon which we place the most value, our precious infrastructure. It amazes me that of all the things to be concerned about the least important of them is where all the attention is focused but that is us or, in the very near future, that was us.

So here I sit, wondering who I shall become in the face of the horrors that will face us and I have no idea. All of us will be forced at some point to become someone else, hopefully someone better, when everything we know and do is ripped out from beneath us. The tearing of the fabric that constitutes our reality is getting closer and closer to home and it will not be long before we are required to make a choice.

I would only say choose wisely as the choices you make now will most likely have a finality that no other choice you have made up until now has had.