Waste

If the world is going to end soon, I have wasted a lot of time.

If the world system is even now collapsing in slow motion, and life as we know it is over, I am feeling very stupid that I spent so much time worrying about whether I'm going to grow old alone. Or whether I'll be able to keep writing blog posts at this pace. Or whether the bulbs we accidentally plowed under this summer will germinate in April. Or whether my hair is going to keep falling out. Or whether I'll bomb at the retreats I'm scheduled to speak at this fall.

What was that story in the Bible about the guy who had so much surplus that he lost sleep worrying about what to do with it all, and spent his energies building barns and planning his retirement-only to die that night?

I wonder how the politicians who lied their way into office will feel, rationalizing that they needed to do that in order to rise to the position where they could do some genuine good for society.

"I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy" (The World's Last Night and Other Essays).