No Shade of Grey

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace

―John Lennon, "Imagine"

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Dear Kate,

What do you expect from me?

What should we expect from each other?  The very best that we can be?  The very worst we can't begin to imagine about each other, let alone ourselves?

Both ends are real possibility, both just as likely--circumstantial maybe, but always consequential to perpetuate our circumstances.

The best of me is magnanimous, meaning every word of it when I sing Lennon's "Imagine" like it's the anthem for humanity.  The worst of me I've yet to know, but wouldn't rule out the will to detonate an atomic bomb if the button is big and red, clearly marked like my reason for using it, my difficulty to avoid it, my insistence on seeing no other color but red.

So I suggest, in our interaction, that from me you would expect the best but plan for the worst.

Cynical?  I am not sure.

Let's say you only want to see the best in me, to infuse in yourself the most positive energy so to energize our relationship likewise.  Well, you know you will be disappointed.  Bitterly, sometimes.  Would that be my fault for not putting on my forehead a warning label?  You were the one who peeled it off.  What are you going to do then?  Pull me down from heaven and throw me in hell?  What good will that do to you, to me, to anything at all?  I am who I am, the most glorified creature of God, fallen; your experience with me points out only the most obvious.

Do good things, and reinforce the best intentions in each other, that is how we want to conduct our dealings with people, people who are (still) on good terms with us.  If we find ourselves in need to deviate from such "life-affirming" strategy, it's because the terms are no longer good.  The world is full of evil.  Someone is responsible for it.  If you the good gal didn't do it and I the good guy wasn't in on it either, then someone else, evil people, our opponents, must be the culprits.  If the terms of our engagement now need adjusting, it must be you weren't on my side after all, if ever, at all.

Those who have only positive energy to exude refuse to see.  They imagine like Lennon did, which is to stop imagining.  To "imagine all the people living life in peace" is to take in the full measure of the paradoxical nature of Man, no deifying, no demonizing, but drinking up black-and-white simultaneous--which doesn't mean grey.  "Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself."

Tomorrow you will wake up hopeful.  Tomorrow you will wake up hopeless.  How about both?

Yours, Alex