Optimism and pessimism are imposters.
Past and future are constructs
Life is an endless sequence of present moments.
When you find that, you realize the greatest gift is to just realize you are alive - I mean really realize it.
No roof brain chatter and compulsive thinking.
Then you see life has another side of the veil.
Stay objective - be Zen
When you observe the good and bad, the bad often passes you over.
Awareness is protection - no covers over the head.
My mother, HS football coach, fav prof, minister and his wife all passed within a few weeks of each other in 22. Watching parents die is worse than having them die. I saw something in that and was relieved for the invisible hand showing itself.
When I first heard BS I saw he had spiritual/religious influences.
His Catholic upbringing showed - both the anger he had for nuns and the enlightenment he got from his mom.
So she's good now and Bruce will know it
"Eternity is calling Bruce Springsteen, and it’s drawing him back to his childhood parish church, whose steeple cast a long shadow over his working-class upbringing and whose liturgies echo in nearly every song he’s written since then. For Springsteen, the Catholic Church stands at the “origins of his dreams and his beliefs”, as one appreciative essayist has written. Now, it seems, the Boss is poised to return to those origins, to walk the long walk home.
But the Boss was quick to dash hopes that he might throw his hat in the 2020 ring. “I’d be terrible,” he said. No, these days Springsteen is spending more time with ghosts. “I enjoy visiting the spirits of my father and [E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons], and my friends and family, which I do on stage each night.” The most haunting presence of all: the Catholic church in Freehold, New Jersey, where as a boy he witnessed “an eternal parade of baptisms, weddings and funerals” (as he recounted in his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run).
He’s now regularly stopping by that church in Freehold where he served as an altar boy, per the Times. This, even though “over the years he has railed against his strict Catholic upbringing” and notwithstanding the “harsh treatment meted out by nuns” at his Catholic elementary school.
Springsteen is nearly 70. “You get more spiritual as you grow older,” he said. “You’re closer to the other world, so maybe that has something to do with it … I do still find myself drawn to the Catholic Church. I visit my small church quite often … I continue to feel the Catholic Church’s imprint on me rather strongly.” That’s putting it mildly; indeed, entire books have been written about the Catholic sensibility that infuses Springsteen’s work, going back to his first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J."
So I never saw BS as a political thing
When people resent fathers and authority it often comes out in political reactions to authorities involuntarily
