Today’s lunch is now history (at least the ingestion of it). I sit in the still calm of my cubicle and nibble on fresh delicacies that Mary has prepared and sent with me. I read my TIME magazine without caring who may see me doing it, and I quite take for granted the privilege of agreeing or disagreeing with what I’m reading. Intellectually I know that there’s war, drought, famine and disease out there somewhere, but experientially those things just don’t ring true.
What I also know at the intellectual level is that my tranquil existence could change in a heartbeat. History, in large part, is composed of such cataclysmic turns of events when nothing is the same thereafter. James Burke refers to them as the days when the universe changed. So what’s my role? Do I passively accept my good fortune while actively cultivating a spirit of gratitude? Am I to be preparing for an unexpected change that may subject me to the horrors that afflict so much of the rest of humankind? Is there some way that I can leverage my many blessings into happiness for those less fortunate?
These are the things I think about when I am not required to think about something else. I want to believe that these are the things that others are thinking about when they have the opportunity. I wish that there was a way to share, to encourage like-minded thought, to enter into communion with the whole. Lunch is over.
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