It's no longer enough to be compassionate, for love is now a zero sum game.
Or is it that our compassion has grown so limited... in these boxes we call home?
Black lives. Blue lives. Queer lives. All.
Choosing one is choosing against the others (or so the story goes).
Sitting at home the other night so paralyzed that I could no longer turn away, I sought refuge where I have so many times before... in books.
But standing once again before a bookshelf that has often been my altar, it struck me:
My compassion has been replaced by my passions.
What if the things I love have taken the place of my interest in what others hold dear?
So I've decided to read more of what others call their own.
I (re)turned first to an autobiography which I've always found troubling.
Truth be told it troubles me still.
I don't LIKE it. But finally I see the value in that.
For it's things I've LIKED that have kept me warm in a world which is shrinking by the day.
I'm of an age where that phrase - the shrinking world - used to mean progress.
It no longer means any such thing. Not to me.
My world has contracted because I failed to continue to expand it.
In surrounding myself with only things I LIKED, I lost the ability to see how other things (and those who loved these things) were actually LIKE me.
I need to reconnect.
If it's for me to tell the story, then I can no longer ignore the greater narrative.
Black. Blue. Queer. All.
It's time to read more of what I haven't LIKED before.
For if I don't, I'll never learn just how LIKE me the many I'm yet to meet truly are.
