Midnight and Beyond

I see the world from a different perspective around midnight. The race of the day is over, my wife is asleep in bed, and I have decompressed from a long week and a particularly long day. After going out for sushi and attending an odd, but interesting, musical, I feel relaxed...save for a godawful pain in the right side of my neck and my right shoulder, which has been growing worse for several days. But even that pain seems a bit more distant after midnight. I feel like I have a private pocket of time that's all mine...my experiences, my thoughts, my ideas...they're all mind in this little private pocket.

It is tough to establish a line, or a measure, of what's reasonable as to the level of freedom, luxury, and access to basic necessities that is unselfish...where my North American experiences go over that line and turn my expectations into selfishness.

I wonder whether anyone has ever measured what financial resources, in local capital, would be available to every person on earth if the cash wealth of this planet were distributed equally. I have a sense that the poorest among this planet's inhabitants would be dramatically enriched, and that the world's richest people would still live far above where the least fortunate live today. Just a gut feel, nothing I know how to meaure.

It's morning, now, hours after I wrote the words above. I wanted to view them outside of my "private pocket" to see whether they still make sense. They do, but perhaps the light of day makes the thoughts behind them seem less acute.

Surprise! My wife just got up...far earlier than normal, despite the fact that she was awake far later than normal. It's late in the morning for me to have gotten up so recently, too...well after 7:30 and nearing 8:00, which is extremely late for me on an average Saturday. I've just poured my first super-mug of coffee and my wife is busy making her first cup of tea.

Now that my wife is up and about, I'll abandon this little project and may come back to write more later in the day...but for now, I will post these Friday night and Saturday morning thoughts and experiences.