Happy New Year's

    The end of another calendar year. Not really a big deal for a seasoned member of that strange and endangered tribe called Teachers. Our year ends on or about June 28th and our New Year's Eve is Labor Day. That said I drove down to the Bronx today. I walked around, enjoyed the sunshine and visited some of the places of my youth. I try not to worry about the things I have no control over - which is almost everything. I don't really watch much TV or read much of anything but random stories that seem to come to me out of nowhere. (Today I came across the name U Dhammaloka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Dhammaloka . Fascinating story of a man that is still revered in Burma and that history tried to erase, that I knew nothing about.) I often see articles that seem to have no relevance to me, this time period or place. Of course everything and everyone is connected. Seeing that connection and becoming attuned to it is what has happened to me over the past few years. I think deeply about connections that don't seem to go together. Try it. Meditate. Talk to the kid that projects all that anger towards you. I throughly enjoy the art of conversation. It is a dying art. People are becoming more self centered, introverted and losing much of what it means to be human. Today I watched a brief snippet  on a gorilla, Koko, that was raised by humans and taught sign language. Koko sentences were brief, beautiful and innocent. Koko seems more human than many people I come across. I don't say that as an insult to people or a compliment for Koko. We have no control over what the future may hold, but like Dhammaloka or even Koko, we can control how we act and react to it. Happy New Year's.