Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way

Well, today has not been a dull day for me. They rarely are. The moments fleet quickly by. Yet at the end of each day, I look back and wonder what I’ve really gotten done.

Here it is 12:30 in the afternoon on the day of my tenth wedding anniversary. I started gathering ideas for this blog post a few days ago and hoped to have it up early in the morning.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

What is the way? Kim and I have been very involved in politics over the past few years. We’ve struggled financially and with our health. We don’t have much of anything solid to point to. We’ve worked on many Quixotic causes. Yet we aren’t waiting for someone or something to show us the way. We are out trying to forge a new way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long and there is time to kill today

Well, it is a rainy day today. Rainy days always slow me down. But I am no longer young. I hope my life will be long, but there is not time to kill. As if you could kill time without wounding eternity.

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

Well, now we get to the key line, the line that made me think of Pink Floyd’s Time. Ten years have got behind us.

No, I didn’t miss the starting gun. My first career was pretty successful. I got married, had two daughters and worked hard. I made a lot of money and then it all fell apart.

When Kim and I met we were both rebuilding our lives. Trying to learn from what had gone wrong in the past, to find new priorities, new ways of doing things. We had a daughter of our own who is growing up loving her older sisters and having very different experiences than they did.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs recently. It seems like in my early years, I spent much of the time pursuing my physiological and safety needs. Even when I was making more money per year than probably 99% of other Americans, I was still stuck on the baser needs. Loving, belonging, esteem and self-actualization all suffered. I wonder how much this is the case in politics today. Are the small government conservatives stuck pursuing physiological and safety needs and missing needs of loving, belonging, esteem and self-actualization?

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again

Anyway, I digress. Yeah, I didn’t miss the starting gun. I ran the race pretty well for forty years, but the sun was sinking, always coming up behind me again.

The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

For me, back when I was stuck pursuing physiological and safety needs, and I suspect for many others stuck in similar ruts, the sun is the same in a relative way. Yet for me now, things are different.

Yes, the race to meet physiological and safety needs has gotten much more difficult. It has also, perhaps, gotten a bit less important. What matters is loving, belonging, esteem and self-actualization. It makes it possible to see the sun and moon in new ways.

Today, Kim and I celebrate the tenth anniversary of our wedding. Loving, belong, esteem and self-actualization have flourished during these ten years, even as our physiological and safety needs have been more difficult. I think of everyone who is so caught up in making sure that the big old government doesn’t take away some of what they’ve stashed away to meet their physiological needs. Then, I think of the old zen monk.

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing to steal.

Kyokan returned and caught him. "You may have come a long way to visit me, " he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift."

The thief was bewildered. He tool the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."

Sitting at my computer at home, I muse about all those tea partiers afraid that the ultrarich will have to pay more in taxes. I wish they could find a relationship as beautiful as my wife and I have found.