“This moment, right now, is the first moment of the rest of eternity, the plans I made yesterday, last week or last year simply don’t apply, but if I know where to point the question, “What now?” A whole new beginning will be laid out for me, am I ready to ask the question?”  – Brad Cullen (from the 3^rd chapter of “In the Beginning”)

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”  – Marcus Aurelius

The above quote is an opinion and interpreted into English, from what the old boy said in Latin almost 2,000 years ago. I happen to believe it, as quoted, and therefore it guides my life.

Apply the quote, if you will, to the present plethora of opinions about the current crisis …everything you hear from the media and experts alike, is OPINION, everything you see and experience related to it is perspective, not the truth.

As an aside, the unfortunate thing about quoting Marcus Aurelius is that he has been labeled by others as a stoic. I say, “A stoic as defined by whom?” That’s like labeling me a Christian – I reject the label because the term means too many different things to too many different people to convey any real meaning or truth to anyone. I believe the same thing applies to stoic.

Why is it important to drag that into the conversation? Because what you think about both stoicism and Christianity is opinion and not a fact and has no bearing on anything. The labels get us off the track of pursuing as much truth as is possible for us to digest.

Okay, we’ve had our break, I’ve had a whole new beginning laid out for me, because I asked the question, WHAT NOW, but more importantly I knew to WHOM to direct the question and that’s what forced the issue.

If you don’t believe in a WHOM that is beyond your ability to understand or explain, but that you trust anyway, then you might as well stop reading because you’ll get nothing out of this. I  don’t say this because I think I’m smarter than you are, you may be far smarter than I, but I believe I AM connected to universal-creativity (a verb NOT a noun) and so the answers I get are guidance not intellectual understanding and the answers are far beyond my intellectual capacity to express.

IN THE BEGINNING, is to be the title of the sequel to Leapfrog, if you’ve been following the series so far, you already know that.

Let’s have a little review and thereby we can start from here without having to backtrack. I wrote what I thought was the beginning of the sequel six years ago – and never wanted to go beyond the climactic chapter which pointed to a vague, yet exciting future for the six characters, Jeff and Roberta Barrett, Walt and Jan Hashimoto, Jeanne Stockwell and Brad Cullen.

The startling revelation I received while writing this series was that what I had written and thought was the beginning of the sequel to Leapfrog which, in the way it is written, is a continuation of sorts, but only if we insist upon looking at it that way, was the ending of the novel, leaving the new beginning for the six characters to the imagination of each individual reader. 

If you can correlate that, perhaps, to the current situation, you can see how your imagination could be used to provide a new beginning NOW rather than allowing COVID-19 dictate your future.

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Posted in Perspective by Ryan Bruce No Comments Yet