Post Midnight Hours
For some time in my life, post midnight hours seem unique, uneasy, mellow, out of body experiences which affect every conceivable emotional state. Sleep naturally follows at some point. It is postulated that sleep helps clean up clutter in our brain, a sort of tune up before the next day (sort of like those programs which clean your computer of clutter). Cities are different after midnight, nature is different after midnight, civilization seems different after midnight, we ourselves feel different after midnight, unless we are simply too tired to do anything but go to sleep.
Sometimes after watching a netflix movie I feel like I can’t possibly generate the energy to rise from the chair and make it to the bed. But by the time I have cleaned out the cat litter box, changed out of my clothes, brushed and flossed, take my vitamins/pills, checked my email box and the news, I may suddenly be wide awake with my mind eager to ponder everything about life. Before I realize it hours have gone by and I force myself to go to bed lest I feel tired most of the next day. Much of what I might be thinking about matters little to me personally. Maybe it will be the 75 million refugees crammed in tents, hungry most of the time, surrounded by little children and older adults, and all ages in between, dying every day right before their eyes. Other times I think of varied people in my past and wonder about their situation now or try to remember them as they were years ago. Lot of interesting and good people can be found most anywhere.
It is in the post midnight hours when I sense most clearly that I am but a bit player in the evolutionary process. Feeling personally important seems reserved for day time hours when we dutifully play our roles in life as if we were awfully important to ourselves, to others, and to God. It seems those with busy family lives are too worn out to have post midnight, out of body experiences involving matters that are esoteric and elusive. In cities, post midnight hours are heavily youth oriented. It is in youth when it seems our emotional states are at their peak, whether it be love or excitement or music appreciation, or searches for the meaning of life. Of course I am way past the age when I can ever regain the kind of energetic excitement of city life after midnight. Change is the only constant in our lives.
I don’t think age dulls the senses, but life experiences have tempered the arrogant boastfulness and certainties of life that once attempted to dominate our lives. It is strange to finally comprehend that what team wins a sport contest does nothing to change our own lives, that love or sex driven by blind hormonal fantasy and desire was an age related phenomenon which will never be played out in the same manner again, that so much in life, at the time, which felt so important and cherished—with time, will become sullied or no longer have the same power over us as it once did. In youth it was all about ourselves. Now more mature, it seems little about life was ever about ourselves. It becomes incomprehensible how some can have so much and others so little in life, and 75 million refugees becomes an incomprehensible level of depravity and cruelness. It seems beyond the pale that someone could rape and murder a young child or an old woman or actually any other human being. What kind of world are we living in? Whatever God’s role in all of this it can not be any direct involvement. How could we pray to any God who is directly responsible for all this? There is no real comfort in the idiotic answer that ‘God acts in mysterious ways’. Too many people create a God tailored to their own self interests. At the top is the notion that God desperately needs us to worship Him. I suspect that must be news to Him.
It is natural to seek out a special personal relationship with God, and to often believe that all the good things that happened to us came as a gift from God as a reward for doing God’s will here on earth.Diversity may be a key factor in driving the evolutionary process forward, but it also leaves a lot of sad carnage in it’s wake. Of course we are not all born equal, and of course not in America or anywhere else can any of us become whatever we wish to be. Most people are dependent on environmental/genetic situations and help from others to achieve much of anything in life. Look, we can’t in reality, almost all of us, just marry whomever we want. The other person has to be willing also, and so we really end up trying to love someone in our own attractiveness range. Imagine Plain Jane walking up to the Prom King and announcing “I have decided that you are the one I could love with the most intensity forever. Congratulations, we will marry next week.” We actually spend most of our life simply trying to find our place to fit in with a modest degree of success. The reality seems to be that if you really can marry anyone you want, then any marriage won’t last too long. The ‘flavor’ of the day is available whenever the mood hits.
Nature is the only real reality and we can only connect to nature in the vaguest way. Today there are estimated to be 8.7 million species on our earth. There are 7 Billion humans on the earth today. 97+ percent of species that once existed have become extinct. The earth is 5 billion years old. How does one take these figures and manage to feel important to the evolutionary process? It is pretty humbling. There is no way any of us can prove Heaven exists or doesn’t exist. A lot of people, mostly to protect their sanity, feel strongly that there is a Heaven. But they never talk much about the specifics of Heaven because that would be impossible. They don’t even fool themselves. No group wails louder at funerals than the ‘true believers’. If there truly is a Heaven for those who sin the least, then we would kill our kids in infancy before they could screw up and not get selected to go to Heaven. And every religious sect has a forgiveness clause, so no matter how much we screw up, we can always be saved by a merciful God. Of course if we killed or ruined several people’s lives earlier in our life, before being ‘saved’, well we get to go to Heaven by the mercy of God after we are saved. And those we harmed before we were saved, go to hell unless they were already saved before they might have later on have been “saved”. We always make God out to be so cruel and unfair. Why would I pray that God nullify His laws which govern the evolutionary process on my behalf, to make my life better in this or that way while he would ignore the prayers of the 75 million homeless refugees? We can bet our asses that most of them pray a lot harder and a lot more often than we might. Then we have the audacity to feel that God likes us better. Humans, to a great extent, are extremely self serving when it comes to religion or ethics. Would Jesus really say “I don’t want any of those 75 million homeless refugees living on my block or in my neighborhood, or in my state, or in my country. Build a wall.”
What God did give the human species, via His evolutionary process, is the ability to help others. There is ample evidence now from scientific studies that those who help others are the most contented humans on earth regardless of their wealth, titles, ethnic group, religious group, culture and so on. Instead, it is much more likely that we will chase compulsive behaviors of varied sorts to achieve temporary pleasures which then traps us into the mentality that enough is never enough.
We might ask, “well, what do these post-midnight hour feelings and thoughts do for those of us who have them? “ They are probably like sleep in that they better prepare us to be more contented in daylight hours when reality rules. The less understanding we have about the realities of life, the less likely we can enjoy our terminational years. I think for me, if I cannot continue, on a daily basis, to understand more about the different aspects of life and evolution and the laws of nature, and the diverse nature of the human species, then I do not feel more contented. We could spend a day chit chatting, but at the end of the day what has this done to our mindset? Of course, conclusions reached today may well have to be altered in future tomorrows. Change is a good sign since we do not reach final conclusions on major aspects of life after one day of pondering. The percentage of the time we ever end up right about any aspect of life before we croak is really not important at all. If we cannot come to understand that it is God’s laws which govern the evolutionary process, not us or any bunch of us—if we cannot understand this—then we will be frustrated most of our life.
It seems, and maybe this is just personal, that the post-midnight hours are when we are most likely to line up clarity of thought with the greatest depth of feelings on most matters. The quietude of such post midnight hours is almost a necessity for us to concentrate on such lofty matters. Most large gatherings of people are just disingenuous acting charades in which everyone projects an image of how they wish us to think of them at that moment in time. How many times do we get annoyed that someone acts in a manner which does not fit our perception of them? Why do we even bother to watch political speeches, since so often now a political party may have more than a dozen debates scattered over many months. Most politicians don’t even write their own speeches anymore, how the hell could they when their daily schedules include several public speeches. With all the sophisticated gadgets available to successfully be disingenuous with the voters, coupled with the complexity of the major issues, most voters vote more like they were contestants on the dating game: “I like this candidate best”. If we ever watch the comments by ‘undecided’ voters after a debate it was all about their feelings about candidate personalities. Democracy is failing us and we, including myself, are puzzled how to solve the problem.
Having said all this about the post-midnight hours, it must be admitted that all this pondering about deep esoteric aspects of life is probably just a reflection of personality and genes. We all know people who live a very orderly life, watch TV all day, spend most waking hours tweeting snippets of mundane matters to others, play computer games, and never really have any deep or knowledgeable thoughts about the weighty aspects of life. There is no way to engage them in any depth about any complicated political or philosophical aspects of life. It is painful to watch them struggle to say anything noteworthy on many topics. Is there any significance to this? If there is, it escapes me. I have written nearly 500 lengthy musings on endless aspects of life. None of this, regardless of the percentage of the time any of the verbiage is true, affects the evolutionary process. What is best in whatever the environment of the time will survive. The laws which govern the process of evolutions determine the direction of evolution, not any of us. We are all pawns in the process. All we ever get is a chance to achieve some contentment in our lives over a minuscule period of evolutionary time. The cards we get in our hand at birth are by chance, God isn’t slipping any select cards into our genetic hand, or the environment in which we are born, or the historical time we are born, or who our parents are and so on. To achieve maximum contentment we must have help from others, and this depends a lot on the ethical nature of the society in which we live, and the the particular people who cross our path and impact on us. Whole lot of luck floating around our entire life. For the maximum number of people in any society to achieve some contentment in their lives requires the Golden Rule, in which both the giver and the receiver reach a higher level of personal contentment.
The post- midnight hours are a special time of day for me. Suppertime might be a special time of day for a particular person or family. Church service might be a special time of day for others. This is just another example of diversity. Without an appreciation of diversity we could become another Trumpish caricature of anger, revenge, always seeking to give others the short end of the stick in any interactions, and be unable to sleep well at night from all the compulsive combativeness during daylight hours. Without the Golden Rule as a way of life, our way of life becomes mired in frustration. For me, it seems there is a need to mellow out during periods of the day in order to keep my understanding at a peak and my emotional state more contented. Post-midnight plays an important role in my well being.
I finish here what always seems so appropriate for most of my musings:
“There is a way of life, a way of thinking, of behaving towards other men and your fellow creatures, towards all living things, towards the whole earth and the sky and the sun that is based on love, on compassion, on respect, on cherishing everything there is around you because it is wonderful, unique, it’s natural and good and it evolved that way by itself, it’s got to be cherished and if we think like that, and live that kind of life, we can all have our freedom, we can all have our happiness, we can all feel the sun and smell the grass and smell the flowers and look upon each other with appreciation.” (Unknown)
