A thunder shower, and vapor

I got into my Day 3 exercise campaign.  Felt more sore when I started than I had anticipated, but I ran my 5 minutes, walked 10, ran five and then walked 10 more.   About half way into my trek it started raining with thunder booming around and lightning hitting off in the distance.  It only rained hard enough to gradually drench the top half of my shirt so all in all it was not too bad.  I was pretty tight when I got back to the room so I took some Advil, showered and hopped into bed. This morning I am pleasantly surprised, not sore at all.  Good deal.

While I was doing the run/walk the rain turned to a light mist and that spring boarded me to the thoughts below.

Spiritual Time: What we all want, but may not know it..yet.

One of the parts about running and walking alone is that I can think, talk to myself, pray or just drone out to the rhythm of my pace without distraction.   The movie "What Women Want" with Helen Hunt and Mel Gibson illustrates what I am talking about.  If you have never been a runner or distance walker the clip linked below will help help you relate to the way I feel when I get out and do this....no its not metaphorically about the road, but it is the time of solitude that makes it the most enjoyable.  My friends know I am alone in a hotel room.  "Dude, that's pretty darned solitary" should be the comment and it is indeed allot of alone time, but even there there are distractions.  There's the TV, internet, my telephone, food, the I-Pad, and work projects that all tempt me to do anything, but be alone.  

Link1
"What women want". The Nike Scene.

When I get get out on my walk or run I  have nothing to distract me.   I'm not one of those people that has to slap on a set of headphones the second they get by themselves, especially when they are out for some exercise.  In my opinion, people that do this will say they just like music, but I think the reality is that they either do not want to be alone with their thoughts or they just don't have any of their own. It seems many just have to have something blaring into their ears to drown out any hope of considering themselves, who they are or what they are doing.  A man came by me going in the opposite direction yesterday and I swear he was Facebooking while he ran.
  If they just shut everything off would it be like the two women in this 2nd clip from "What women want?" .  Note from minute 1:27 on.  Also notice that the last thing anyone would really want to do is to be able to read the thoughts of other people nonstop.  I mean their real thoughts, because many unpleasant things go on in most peoples heads that never come out of their mouths, things I just don't want to know nor would they want to be known.
Link2
No other thoughts

Shifting gears, I would like to get back to the idea in the heading.  The idea of a vapor or mist. In the book of James it says, "What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes."

I was thinking about this morning in the context of my grandfather who died in 1981.   He was a common man, a dairy farmer to be exact.  Jay Clement left a legacy of living human beings, but not much else.  His farm is now defunct and no longer owned by our family.  At one point in time he had run one of the prominent dairies in our county. Times have really changed since he passed away.  The dairy "Hancock Country Creamery", he once was a co-op owner of was sold off to a larger dairy in 1990 and now it does not exist at all. The new owner shut it down in favor of its larger operations.  At the time of the sale only one local dairy remained that provided milk to the creamery.

I have heard tell that the essence of who a person is is completely gone within two generations of their death. This essence means that when people that really know you now, who know the way that you speak, your mannerisms and that have the feel for who you really are have also died, all of the real knowledge of you as a person is completely gone from this world.  Your gravestone remains, a company you started or house you built may also remain, any writing you did or professional accomplishments are there, but the essence that made you be you to the world has vanished.  It could be really depressing to think that in this sea of humanity that we might be no more than one insignificant fish in a school of fish that live, eat, and die to end as something that meant no more to this world than a place holder and fodder for the next generation.   This in itself makes me glad that I am no atheist, because as an intelligent human I see the fact that we exist at all as something more amazing and miraculous than to cynically dismiss it as trial and error and the accidental success of an unintelligent experiment.

I now care for my body, not out of the fear of dying sooner if I don't, but because of my Hope.  Because for this Hope, I would like to enjoy this life I have been granted and not merely exist for a moment.   My hope is that while temporally I will vanish and be nothing in short order, I will be more than that in a world to come. We don't want to be forgotten, but the fact is we will be.  Everyone is forgotten eventually, most completely and some only as icons and facsimiles of the person that was.  The difference for some is the Hope.