Sketchy Memories and Mirror Neurons

Mirror neurons. That’s what I’ll blame. For all those cockeyed screw-ups, impulsive decisions with sober consequences. Trying to keep up with everyone else’s version of wealth and happiness. We all reflect each other at times. We are so intimately connected sometimes we mirror each other.

At other times we may stand alone and actually show some courage or a moment of true principle. How easily I can intellectualize the righteousness and morality demanded of a circumstance; but I notice I’m not experiencing much of anything. Reminds me of the Dalai Lama’s answer. Some impertinent reporter put the question to him: “Are you enlightened?”  Well, excuse me, but that stopped the train. A sacred hush descended upon one and all like a flock of dead doves. Our holy man of that giddy giggling (should get betrothed to Desmond Tutu?) did seriously pause and entone, “No.”

But for some reason my major moral misfires have been visiting me of late. Raise money for a project. Great excitement. Jubilation. Run out of money and raise some more. Do that more than a few times and you have entered into a habit worse than addiction.

Being nickled and dimed to death doesn’t work either for an entrepreneur of grand schemes – and the word ‘schemes’ does not necessarily infer conniving or duplicity. One needs a scheme to win a chess game. And a scheme to best an immoral employer.  When a great idea works, it works big. I was accused once by a former editor of a local Vancouver rag that I had great ideas almost every day of my life.   

But alas: the square holes and round pegs bewildered me. And cost others. Darts anyone? Maybe with a picture of Ponzi front and centre. 

In all of these remembrances of backstroking through cesspools, trying to dredge up enough detritus to haul oneself out of financial mire, I am fondly reminded of attending Mass every Sunday and really listening to the sermon. That weekly occasion of standing, kneeling and singing and praying shoulder to shoulder was more critically important than I could have realized. That one hour connected me once a week to all those other desperate people and a brave priest fumbling about with us tinkering faithfully with our moral compasses; and there we mingled with all those tricky mirror neurons, trickier even than the spooky house of mirrors at the local carnival all those bumper-car-crashing decades ago.  

And I for one could survive with increased comfort hearing words well spoken of love and the magnificence of Man every day.