What makes sense to do?

I have a powerful and peculiar brain compared to a bug’s brain. But it is just like yours – except that it is unique. And so is yours. Even a bug is not precisely like every other bug in its thinking and actions - such as they are.

Where is the sense in this? you are asking. But it was only my brain talking earlier, and there seemed to have been something sensical at the time.

But here is one puzzle. What is worth doing? How is it not an entirely frivolous use of my time to write this apparent nonsense – and yet somehow it means something to me.

I could grow beans and rice with my time, carrots, bok choy, black-seeded Simpson lettuce. Or like my brother-in-law, I could buy and sell, sort and schlep, trundle stuff from storage lockers to Ebay to flea markets and still barely make enough to provide for his family the way he would like to do.

All the while I don’t get paid at all for writing poetry and other nonsense.

Consider all that unbelievable amount of wasted time before we were born, and then there will be all that unbearably long time after we are gone, and then in between there’s all of this. And yet we burn this brief candle as if everything matters – doing what? And why?

Why not just sit on a bench with a cardboard sign that reads, ‘will eat food for spare change – will sleep in the scrub woods on the edge of town for nothing.’

Some of those brains are damaged and skewed – in ways that are different from yours and mine.

And yet the time will pass no matter what we do.

What is the measure of worthiness when all will be consumed?

I never had the chance to meet the man who made the most exquisite baskets out of pine needles and bits of grasses and stuff that I saw at a friend’s house one evening. Put a match to them and all that time and effort put into those baskets would be ash in an instant. And who needs pine needle baskets, anyway? And anyway, the man, too, is gone.

We are filled from birth with drive and abilities, with desires and energy. And so each of us does what each of us finds to do, the apparent difference between necessity and frivolous so glaring, yet so insignificant.

I admire the tall, brown leather boots my wife bought – the animal cared for and killed for its hide, the skin worked, tanned, shaped and stitched. Then on the outside of each boot someone placed three brass-colored metal buckles, somewhat for function, mostly for style. There’s also an intricately fashioned zipper running down the inside, a long-toothed slide from the top to the arch so that the boot can slide over the heel, the foot coming to rest on a crafted bed. Hands were involved and hands made the machines that were also used.

These boots are no accident, but who really needs boots such as these? The bugs and the beasts of the fields? Consider the lily; they toil not, neither do they spin.

Why not just lay ourselves down and die?

And why do some write on corrugated scraps of cardboard and I – I write my printed and pretty-sounding words. And men and women, and sometimes little children, toil for their survival and for my survival while a contrived and accidental system provides easy opportunities for some and harsh gain – even loss – for others.

Oh Jesus! You left so many questions with only the hints of answers.

You said that God said, ‘You fool, this night your soul shall be required of you, then whose shall these things be, which you have prepared?’

But who or what made us this way in the first place?

And what else are we supposed to do with our time? Without food we will not eat. Without art, we’d rather starve.

What nonsense would you compare to my nonsense? Or flip it. What makes sense for you to do?