“The Stroll” was a sixties dance. Nowadays we have “The Scroll.” You stand or sit and stare at an LED light while moving your finger from the bottom to the top of the light. You look like a hypnotism subject because that’s what you are.
Do the Scroll, baby, Do the Scroll, Keep on staring till you grow old, Keep on staring till your burned eyes roll, That’s how you do it, baby, Do the Scroll.
Give it a melody and a beat, and I think I have a hit.
Every Sunday morning, I get a notification from my iPhone that I spent 3 or 4 hours on my phone daily for the past week. I always scoff because how could I possibly have stared at that little screen for that length of time?
The notification always buzzes in at 9 a.m. sharp on Sunday — it buzzes rather than chimes because I’ve silenced the phone for church. I should probably take the buzz as my signal to start praying: “Lord, stop me from looking at this thing!!”
“Action is hope,” says the Ray Bradbury quote in the back of my desk. “At the end of the day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad — you did it.”
I had to clear a space on my desk to set down my journal and copy the quote. And in doing so, I found an action I will do today.
I resolved: I like this desk. I like sitting at it and using it. Before I do anything else, I will clear the junk away to expose the surface so I can use the desk again.
And I proceeded to clear the desk. And what do you know, that gave me hope.
Hooray, hooray, the First of May. No more wishing for springtime, the green is here and waiting for our attention.
I have numbered my posts since I started doing this daily back on Aug. 1, 2020, and every hundred days I get to write a post that ends in “00” (zero-zero). Today is post number 2,100. It’s always a time of a little extra reflection and contemplation.
Who am I to be inflicting my thoughts on the universe every darn day, anyway?
I am a writer with a song in my heart. The things that most make me feel like my life has a purpose are creating music and coaxing words together. At this stage in my life, my words do not travel as far as they once carried, although I’m aiming for different targets — hundreds if not thousands of people read my accounts of county board meetings and parade grand marshals, and these days I’m fortunate to reach a few dozen with my ramblings on a given morning. But perhaps I can have a greater impact on the few than I did on the many.
In hopes of putting better words together for today, I sat down in my old blue chair in the corner of my office. Some time ago I taped a hard copy of an old post next to the chair, in a spot you really can only see if you’re sitting in this chair. It’s the post where I swore off writing about politics and government and wondered aloud what I would write if I avoided those topics.
My mind immediately went to the fruits of the Spirit, and I copied the list — “love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”
What if, instead of looking for the latest outrage — and there always is at least one — we spent our time looking for examples of gentleness or kindness or goodness? What if we not consider our day complete until we have found those examples?
I suspect we would be encouraged by how easy it is to find love, joy and peace abounding in so many places beyond those halls of power we let distract us from reality all the time.
