I spend more time every day doing worthless things.  I use my hours stalking my old friends and gaping at who has gained weight or who has married or who has ten children and another on the way than I do thinking about important thoughts or talking to those I love about the state of our respective worlds.  It is easier to turn the computer on and to turn my mind off than to live vigilantly and deliberately.  It is easier for me to be part of a mock world than to venture forth and say hi to my neighbor.

Being honest is so difficult.  Not honest in the biblical sense of telling the truth about having eaten the last cookie from the jar, but in the sense that seeing reality as it is becomes more difficult as one ages.  We are all storytellers; we see something happen in the world and internalize it in our minds and that is the fiction that we choose to live.  When I was younger, however, I was less scared of the things I perceived.  I was more liable to look someone in the eye and tell them precisely what I saw, fictional storytelling or not.

When I was in Africa and I was torn apart by the rage I felt at organized religion for decimating the indigenous tribes, I wrote vehemently and passionately, journaling with tears pouring from my eyes at the injustices I had seen.  I sat inside a tent in the middle of the Maasai Mara, my world inalterably changed by the experience I was having and I simply felt it.  I cried until there were no tears left and I listened to "The Arrival" until it put me to sleep almost every night I was there.  I was livid.  I was seething.  The childlike glee with which I had approached the world for 21 years prior was disappearing.  I was becoming something new.  Altered.  Permanently.  For better or worse.  But I was, in the least, very much alive to the newer version of myself.

In the wake of the shootings in Aurora, a gun threat at work, and an absolutely joyous celebration with good family, I have written precisely zero letters to document or process my world.  I have sat in the passengers seat and simply allowed life to happen to me.

I am edging dangerously close to a stereotype in saying that I "allowed life to happen to me."  This is something people say to one another all the time in coffee houses.  It is vague and lacks meaning and is probably most often muttered by self-help coaches.  It is an avoidance of saying something with merit or value.  It is a filler.

What we should say instead of such a meaningless phrase, is that which digs at us most deeply.  We should decry the shootings in Aurora as a beyond awful event, as something that rips at the fundamental fabric of the way most of us see the world.  We should decry the death of so many young people as utterly, terribly heart breaking.  We should look with pity in one moment and rage in the next at the shooter and try with all that we have not to hate him and not to want to kill him with our bare hands and not to want to put him against a wall and shoot each limb individually and watch as he suffers so that the world will hold some form of karmic justice.  And we should not, in a moment of enlightenment (however brief these moments are), be ashamed to admit that there is room for empathy for a human being so tortured and sad and alone that he would go so far as he did on that Friday morning.  It should be okay to go from hatred to love to anger to deep sadness in a matter of moments.

What I should say, instead of saying nothing, is that incidents like that remind me of my own mortality.  They remind me of the fact that I might not wake up tomorrow.  That, despite my youth, I am still vulnerable.  And, if nothing else, I should admit that sometimes there is not order and there is not justice for those who are good.  Sometimes things just don't make sense.  And although there is often overwhelming beauty here, there is also the potential for heartbreaking tragedy.  Gut-wrenching, life-altering pain that leaves the loved ones of victims on a path completely altered from the one they presumed they were walking.  There is room for all these things in life, it is simply nice to believe that perhaps, the events that leave us altered for the better happen more often.

What I would like to learn to do again is to be honest.  To write what I think, without shame or embarrassment.  As I have gotten older, it has been hard to give an opinion on any event because my world has become so gray.  I used to be more black and white, to cling to my beliefs vehemently.  Now, though, I can see a picture in a hundred different ways over the course of five minutes.  I am less certain than ever about truth.  Less certain than I have ever been that it exists at all.  And if there is no truth, how can one share what one sees?

Perhaps even more frighteningly, if there is no truth, is there meaning?