Life is Valuable

Sometimes it is hard to retain the idea of the goodness and immense value of living. I wish I could always maintain that reverence about what it is to experience life. At best I catch fleeting glimpses of this awe inspiring revelation. To live, to see, or hear, or taste, or feel, or touch, or smell all that that is around is so incredible.

It is often easy to take this beauty of life for granted and to instead lose focus on how unique and special it is to be alive. But it is so much richer an experience if we are aware of this gift.

Although not actually related, I must also identify how a feeling of being alive was fostered in me this past weekend. As a vice president of our state's science educators association, I must travel to rather tiresome meetings across the state every few months. This past weekend the meetings began Friday evening and went through Saturday and were in a location nearly three hours from my home. On these occasions, the association picks up the tab for a hotel room for board members who are far away from home.

After the meeting concluded Friday evening, my normal routine would be to go out drinking with the president and treasurer, who are old friends of mine that I do not see often enough, but because both of them were home with the flu (I was in charge of the meetings due to the president's absence), I did not have any particular plans. I had originally thought I would drink in my room and blog a pleasantly silly timeline of my thoughts and feelings. Unfortunately this blogging did not occur, but it did not occur for a rather interesting set of reasons. As I began to drink my first of several double whiskey & seven-up for the evening, I was flipping through the channels on the hotel room's television and stumbled across the Discovery Channel's Friday evening lineup.... American Chopper, Southern Steel, and American Hotrod. Very surprisingly, all three shows were utterly captivating and engrossing. Therefore, instead of drinking and blogging, I decided to drink and envelope myself in the drama of these three television programs. It was both shocking and amazing to watch each episode unfold. In no time at all it was 11pm and I was plesantly sloshed and had also worked through six or seven bowls of Sir Walter Raleigh pipe tobacco and 3/4th of a large "everything" pizza I had delivered to my room. Suffice it to say the evening was enjoyable on many levels.

It was what happened overnight that was to make my awareness of life especially vivid. As is common for me at my age, I often awaken in the middle of the night to relieve my bladder, and when I do so I usually have another pipe before going back to bed. Well, I went over to the window of the hotel and looked out across the city as I lit my pipe. It was an enormous blizzard, much as they were predicting (but are typically wrong about) that made the visibility nearly zero more than 100 feel or so out. Its strenght and its rawness were beautiful to watch as I nurtured the melding of flame and leaf in my bowl. I knew it would be an interesting drive back the next day after the meetings were through.

I shall continue this in the next post. I am going to head home for the evening.

PipeTobacco