I make the active decision, now and continually, never to lose the sense of wonder at all the truly wondrous things of life. Retain the wonder, and eliminate the chance of ever becoming hopelessly mired in the banal repetition of the day to day.

I laughed aloud when I read it, and so I will share this with you:

Tarry thou not to count the seconds, neither cast thy glance onto thy cup, lest thou displease the espresso gods. But fix thy eye instead upon the goodly flow that issueth forth from thy portafilter. Let not this flow persist onto its paling. For to drink of the pale flow is an abomination onto the espresso gods, who will curse thy taste buds onto the seventh generation. Instead, end thy shot when the flow paleth, and thou and thine tastebuds will be blessed unto the end of thy days.

Paradventure thou findest that thy cup is lean; setest thou thy grinder to make a rougher meal of thy coffee. Paradventure thou findest thy cup overflowing, setest thou thy grinder to make a finer meal of thy coffee. For it pleaseth the espresso gods that the flow paleth with the filling of thy cup to its measure.

And if thou wouldst dwell in the land of espresso, serve not unto another an espresso thou wouldst not drink thyself. For remember thou wast once a stranger in a strange cafe.

(Apologies to Moses, King James, and Monty Python.)

You know, life never gets less interesting, does it? Things are ridiculously busy at the moment, there’s just so much going on that anything more would be the end of me. Doesn’t mean I’m not having fun, it’s just that any extra ongoing responsibility would roleplay the mouse symbolically climbing up the back of the camel…

Piano lessons, friend’s wedding preparations, live music at church and elsewhere, dancing lessons, part time work, full time Uni, Hillsong planning and a trip to London!

My quick closing remark, enunciated offhandedly at some unearthly hour by a wiser man than I, has a brevity that belies its depth. All my busyness will always be an expression of my freedom.

“You’re not imprisoned unless you don’t feel free.”

Let me present a quote from the end of The Shawshank Redemption:

“I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged – their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice; but still the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone.”

I would be that person.

Today I had an interesting so-close-to-argument discussion. We were talking about how much money had changed hands between the two of us earlier in the day, and the facts of the scenario were blatantly clear to me (particularly because even Heisenberg couldn’t prevent me from knowing exactly where my cash funds are at at any given time). So I stuck with the axiomatically-derived assertion that 2 x $50 = $100, and that there was no chance the $100 I was given at the start of the day, less only what I spent (and not less any more), could have left the remnant which remained in my wallet.

We worked it out eventually, once the exact facts were established through a third party. The point, however, was not so much that I was right, but that we both reached a mutual understanding. Simply asserting what I knew to be true, with my own empirical reasoning, was enough to do some convincing, mostly about my rightness on little more than a logically sound level. Still, my side of the story wasn’t enough to fill in the gaps in my arguee’s understanding. I was right, but that’s not comforting to someone else who simply can’t piece together the why. My being right had no bearing on their still-deficient worldview. No, it would have been better to follow a partial mantra for life which I put into place some years ago.

Ask the next question.

If you ask the next question in any given circumstance, you move closer to determining the more significant underlying meaning. You extend your mind, pressing past the monotony of the mundane to the strange exhilaration of the unknown. It’s the expression of the mandate to grow always, another life principle of mine.

The next question would have been to establish where the rest of the money could have gone – retrace the spending pattern to complete the picture. It would have meant addressing the affliction rather than only treating the symptoms.

Before the curtain falls, a couple of highly pretentious and equally profound Latin piths. Temet nosce. Oh, and carpe diem, despite its clichéd banality. Really, carpe diem it up. I’ll be asking the next question while I’m carpe dieming, too.