Thump. It's dead. I'd rather not call the furry animal "it" but I am not familiar with gender indicators of squirrels (and even if I were, smushed genitals aren't exactly distinguishable). Just moments prior to me taking the life of this creature, another one of its kind escaped the wrath of my vehicle. And yet, through life's sense of humor, I killed the next squirrel that dared cross my human path. Roadkill is never given much thought. It's gross to most of our kind. Just another obstruction to our driving. That poor squirrel took a gamble and lost.
Today I visited the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art which features an exhibit using board games as a medium to mock the gamble of our modern life. There always seems to be the path that we should take in the Game of Life and the one that we end up on. Each seemingly trivial choice we make leads to some greater final destination. What keeps me up at night and rocks my dreams is the uncertainty of which decisions are not trivial and how we might know that now. I suppose the answer is that we can't know now. The decisions that we make in the present work themselves out in some way into the future. The great unknown.
I am not good at meditation (and I don't actually know how to properly do it), but when I attempt it, I imagine myself as a house. Like the type of house you drew in kindergarten: square frame, two windows and a door, and an equilateral triangular roof. I have function but no emotion. As this house, I quickly pass through landscapes: a jungle, a hilly town, a desert, and alas, an open body of water. There I float. I feel no cold nor warmth, yet I sway as the wind sways. I float. There is nothing around me but sea and sky, and there I float. I float. I float. I float.