Sunrise

I'd intended to get up this morning in time to watch the sunrise.

I had a hard time sleeping last night, so waking up this morning wasn't an issue. I got down to the beach with plenty of time to spare, and scanned the horizon - nothing but solid clouds. There was absolutely no way to watch the sun come up.

It was okay, though. I stood there and watched the sky lighten, and walked along the shore. I got breakfast, and then headed back to the beach. I came back inside for lunch and to make/receive a couple phone calls for some research I'm doing in the fall, and took a short nap.

I had some strange dreams. The only one I remember involves me going into a bathroom, and lifting up the toilet cover, and seeing a bunch of grey shirts in the toilet. There was another one where a bunch of characters from a movie were telling me things as peope in my life (as in, the characters represented real people in my life). I don't remember what they said, though.

Finally, I went back to the beach (Oh, yeah. I'm sunburned - regardless of how religiously I reapplied the damn sunblock. At least it means a nice tan in a week or so, right? :-P) Anyway, I finished reading a book called "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis. It was all about good, and evil, and love, and pity, and how so often "love" is used to describe something that's actually really selfish and not loving, and how "pity" is used by some people to blackmail truly happy, loving, people into not being happy.

Honestly, the book was a bit depressing. It made some really good points, and I think most people (myself included) could find a bit of themselves in it. The hardest part for me to swallow was how the book was all about weakness - pointing out the totally depraved nature of humans, and discussing the - oh.

I was about to rail on a bit about how the book talked about all of these ways to identify love from not-love, but not how to fix those weaknesses in ourselves, but the fixing was actually what the whole book was about. All that any of the characters had to do was swallow their pride a bit and say "Oh, yeah. I wanna be happy too. Me too, please? Maybe I was wrong, but that's okay - happiness is worth it. Let's just love and be happy and flowers and rainbows and bunnies!"

(Plot spoiler coming)

But most of the characters didn't take it. They didn't like the idea of not being needed, not being "necessary", not being "meaningful", not being "right", having to put aside some pride, and so they chose to step away from peace, and happiness, and love. There's an obvious religion thing here, but again, it's something that can be applied to not religion, also. ...I guess in the long run, all of the heavy thinking just comes down to the simple fact that most people will probably be happier when they care the least about what they mean to people.

This is of course ironic, because I think we'd all agree that those we like and respect the most (that mean the most to us) are definitely those who spend the least energy doing things just to please others. (What they do certainly does bring a lot of happiness to people around them, but it's for those OTHER reasons...)

Anyway...it's all pretty sensible; I also think it's one of those things that's much easier to write and think about than it is to actually do.