Gratitude can always replace Pride
...and should, I believe
Later today, I’ll be falling in with the Pride of America Fife, Drum, and Bugle Corps.
I am very grateful to have this opportunity to support my brothers and sisters and others who might not identify as either gender. It’s really none of my business how one identifies. I identify as an imp inhabiting the body that bears the label “Harold Bledsoe Gill, III” but I’m known as Hal by most people, including all those who come through Daily Provisions when I’m on station wearing my name tag.
I’m so grateful to be a part of this world. I did a little writing about it earlier today:
Number 77 Rising in Philosophy?
So, minutes ago I got the notification that I have again reached some level in the top 100 of Philosophy-focused Substacks here. I have no idea why or what it means. I could ask but I hardly care. I’m not here for an audience, really, although I am very grateful for my 873 subscribers including the 22 members of my “Board of Directors” (aka paying subscribers) …
I’m now listening to Robert Anton Wilson’s discussion of Language and Reality. We filter all of our experience through our limited sensory apparti. I’ll be sending out some pretty loud signals through the streets of Washington, DC later today. Fifers are good at that.
The title of this essay goes back to the idea that we can replace pride with gratitude. Gratitude for all live with which we share the planet is highly recommended. We are all interwoven into each other’s existence and we’ve been evolving now for billions of years, so far as we know. Our species of primate is now in a position to enable a future that is hard to comprehend. It’s up to us to be good ancestors. That’s been one of my primary messages that I’ve been attempting to amplify here.
Does this need to be a long essay? Probably not, but I’d like to draw your attention to some of the work that I have been doing here over the past couple of years. I’d also like to draw your attention to the work of others like Kinga:
I’m grateful for her work and I’m grateful for the ability to express it here:
Gratitude for Everyone
What’s it going to be, fellow humans? What can I be but grateful that we have arrived here and now? What are the odds that you and I would come to inhabit this jewel of a planet at this particular time in history? What are we going to do about it? What?
I’m always interested in knowing how I look through other people’s eyes, but we never really know, do we. This relates to the subtitle of this essay titled “Analog” from a few days back:
Analog!
I’ve gotten up a little early ahead of taking my car into the shop at Just Tires to get the air-conditioning fixed. So mundane, right? Meanwhile, I’m spinning a disc that I haven’t listened to because I had to get my turntable fixed. That’s done by hooking it up over an RCA to 3.5 plug gotten from Best Buy in an abortive attempt to get the car fixed las…
Onward is often my battle cry at the end of these essays. This one has it for a title:
Sometimes I take the time to try to explain how I have arrived wherever I happen to find myself:
The Way Here
Sometimes, Substack may seem to be too much. I love how much the platform offers and am always discovering some other way of amplifying my signal through the noise of cyberspace. Substack has brought me back to that feeling when I first stepped into the Internet even before the World Wide Web browsers showed up.
It has been something of a random walk, to be sure. If nothing else, it has left a mark:
Leaving A Mark
Harrowings started out with the comment that we would be delving into “excavations of the Self” that inhabits the animal on its way from dawn to dusk and back again. In that vein, this is on my mind:
I’m now getting the warning that I’m near the email length limit. So I’ll wrap this here with a reminder that you can help amplify my signal through cyberspace and, for that, I’d be very grateful indeed:
Click a button. Any button…