Ulysses thought I'd be upset by his words but to the contrary they are a welcome balm to an addict of the crass, a man who needs to go to meretricious timepiece anonymous meetings. He writes:
I was feeling a bit angry when I wrote that. I was afraid i'd be pilloried for saying such things. I just hate to think that we'd all get stuck in one spot, going around in circles endlessly debating things we've covered before but cannot seem to move past.
I was watching a documentary recently about one of the unsung heroes of 9/11, Marine Jason Thomas. He drove thirty miles every day for a month to ground zero looking through the rubble for people to save, helped rescue several people then promptly disappeared for the better part of a decade. They made a movie called "World Trade Centre" about him, although his role was played by a Caucasian because at the time nobody knew who he was, and that he was an African American, a gentle giant of a man. During the documentary, as he described how he ran towards danger, many of the fire-fighters, having deemed the rubble pile to be unstable and too dangerous, told him to turn back. He simply replied that he was a marine, and marines don't go back, only forwards.
I think there is a life lesson in that simple statement. We cannot go back, but we can move forward, and develop ourselves. Time's Arrow won't allow us to go back and fix past mistakes but we can build something new by setting goals ahead of us; we can strive for something greater. If Jason Thomas and men like him can do so much, then perhaps we can express a little self-control and discipline in the rather more mundane and superficial challenges that we face every day.
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