D-Day

Carpe diem

At the end of a long and exhausting war … the plan that was drawn up for the final assault on the enemy position to conclusively end the blood-letting and bring an end to the fight … came to be named D-Day. In surviving the landing on the beaches the soldiers pushed inwards towards Germany … liberating town after town in France … in what must have represented a personal account of driving through waving crowds of villagers … in an atmosphere thick with being free.

In the years following the end of WWII our own perceptions of freedom and liberty grew by leaps and bounds … fed by the constant cries of victory by the folks who returned personal liberties to a world that was threatened by the iron hand of dictatorship. We had chosen freedom and the responsibilities and commitment that accompanies such a choice. Today we continue to examine our purpose in connection with such a decision.

The picture filled images of WWII galvanized our perceptions of freedom, causing it to flare conspicuously in our conscious perceptions of ourselves and the world. Thereafter it flowed into our dreams, imagination and eventually our attitudes as we rode the bull of lethargy in us to new directions. And when the magazines stopped, the stories, the novels, the movies and the speeches faded behind the curtain of the designer fashion era … we realized we couldn't put the bull down.

Its then that we found ourselves riding the bull of flexed inspirations welling up from distant times. To a man living in these times it was a clarion call to grease his sleepy wheels of resolve and moral persistence and to drive it towards the lost causes of dreams and wishes from our past and to wake them to the new light of day. This we did whether we understood it for what it was … and found the many inflections of its message … from the mysteries of archaeological findings to the jurassic age of living dragons and then back to the future … to view the possible beginnings of the beings who created us.

It has served to entertain us while introducing us to new possibilities about ourselves and the world. The next frontier? Well … let's see now … how about being able to fly? Somewhere in the handling of the goose that lays the golden egg we must remind ourselves of the time worn wisdom of the pace of life and the way that it brings us to apply ourselves to our real needs. To define ourselves, our experiences and to find in the lost causes of universal suffrage … hope to begin anew.

Such a day to end our wandering enthusiasm of possibilities and the landing we hope to achieve … will surely serve as a start to our lives in these tumultuous times. And as we move deeper into the experience … we are creating a greater contact with our lives … and the realization that past errors don't always position themselves in khaki colored superiority forever … and our continued attempts at self persecution doesn't always help to heal.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 �" 1900 ) in a life of inquiry into the nature of the truth … rejected Christian values and founded the conceptual ideal of the superman. In the last years of his life he was institutionalized … and received medical attention. His comment about this phase of his life is something I had found to be very disturbing in my own studies. He said ( paraphrased ) ' I don't know what else I would have done … but to follow the course I had been following all along.'

I beg to differ. I think there is a great deal more that we can do. We can put our experiences in perspective, know the world events that have come to influence our birth … and accept the fallible nature of what we are in our passions, loves and intelligence. Its what we seek … the transformation of our psychology through self awareness … and to treat fallibility so as to respond to behavioral remedies we encounter in the epistemology of human existence. Its what we are about.