10 O’clock on a Thursday Night

10 o’clock on a Thursday Night
I probably shouldn’t be writing this late in the evening, 10 o’clock on a Thursday night. Whenever I get my mind engaged with language at this hour it is usually hard to turn it off. Be that as it may be, what I wanted to write about has been with me these last weeks and months.
On my way home tonight from picking up my daughter from the bus ride home after a softball game I started to verbalize this idea. I wish I had begun my quest to find stupidity earlier in my life. Because I am finding more and more that ignorance is bliss indeed.
Many many years ago I had an artist’s loft apartment in a downtown Jackson commercial building that I’ve discovered has been torn down and is now a grassy lot.
I would leave my friend’s home where I had started watching Monday night football and pick up the game in my loft and watch it from my bed. This went on for weeks and I would stay up late and be too tired for a demanding work day in the morning. Knowing myself well enough, or so I thought, I circumvented the television additction by cutting off the plug of the TV and tossing it out the second floor window onto West Capitol Street. But as with all addictions the true addict finds a way to continue their downfall by finding a work around. Being creative sometimes is as much a curse as a blessing. I stripped off the ends of the two lines of the TV cord stuck them directly into an electrical outlet and secured them with a lamp plug. Viola! More football. I knew something instinctively 30 years ago when this occurred.
Fast forward to tonight on my way home with my daughter in the station wagon. I mentioned that I have been deliberately not filling my mind with television, news and programs of all kinds. I readily admit that I am not completely cut off having a fondness for Masterpiece Theater and Downton Abby and all its dramatic interludes. Movies and these kinds of programs are different categorically. They are not sensationalizing the human condition as interpreted news but story telling of a longer standing human tradition.
I have chosen to allow what room is left in my mind and what time I have left to pursue what I am most interested in – spirituality and how it affects the human condition – I suppose with myself as a guinea pig. I read about artists – painters, sculptors and the like. I continue my grandmother Stevie Moody Flinn’s work of studying various religious traditions while at the same time being grounded in Christianity. I have stumbled onto all kinds of interesting avenues of research that resonate with me, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is a current favorite, and the amazing audio reading of the Cloud of Unknowing by Murray Bodo.
I tried to explain this to my daughter that I wish I had discovered this path to stupidity earlier in my life and that perhaps I would have been happier and more content. By eliminating as much dross and clutter as possible this gives me the time and energy to purse what I think really matters. That the single pursuit of truth has great rewards and happiness.