I don't know what it is or how to name it or even describe it, but it feels like something good is in the air. It's a feeling that is fairly strong. Strong enough to put it down for the first sentence. It's enough that I suspect you might be feeling it, too; that it's something about all of us. It's a deep down inside feeling. I don't dare imagine what it could be about, so I pass it along in case you might be feeling it, too.

When I think of what I would like it to be, my idea of what it would take for everyone to feel better in life, including you and myself, would be an understanding of forgiveness and the need for it in everyday life. An example I won't name comes to mind of someone I know who has a strong spirit of forgiveness in him. Things we wish had never happened occur in his life just like they do in ours, and he feels no rancor for the other party. It's not because anyone told him he's not supposed to, but that he has come to see at some time in his life it doesn't do a bit of good to hold a grudge or get-back-at or hate forever over something done and gone in the past that can't be brought back. He has several friends who are there for him and rally to him when things aren't going so good.

And someone else comes to mind who forgives nothing, keeps a daily log of blame that makes a long list to carry in the mind and speaks with bitterest rancor of the merest offense that occurred, or even might have occurred, years ago. Hate he carries with much pleasure. It generates him. That fist clutching the heart feels good. I've seen him suicidal in remorse for the harm he has done to others that he justified by blaming them. It's a pitiful sight. He has no friends. The rest of us have shades of both. The shades of some are light and the shades of some are dark. The shades of most of us are somewhere near the middle ground. We get mad, hold a grudge, don't-speak-to, don't-look-at, think thoughts we're ashamed of and feel guilty over, wish we didn't feel this way, but can't help it. At other times we're able to forgive and let it go by.

Reasons. We have our reasons for going one way or the other. Our reasons are the bedrock of the decision which way to go.

Opinions. It's like we build our lives with the bricks of opinions. Our own are always right and someone else's are only right when they agree with ours. Most often they do not. I say brick, because opinions give the illusion of substance. We stand on and stand by our opinions. I recall my friend who taught me about the illusion in opinions. He had the whole world figured out and had what looked to me like a logjam of absolute, unshakable opinions about everything that came up. Like Modern Art is nothing but scribbling-anybody can do that. End of subject. I came to see him locked in a prison cell he'd built around himself.

Someone I met along the way who had worked in a circus told me the circus animals are most comfortable in their cages. They're safe there. The bars keep the other animals and the people off of them. I'd always felt sorry for the animals in cages and birds in cages. It had never occurred to me that a cage could be a happy home until I saw it in the cages we build around ourselves with opinions. Opinions are comforting. They give the illusion of understanding.

One evening I was driving home after visiting with my opinionated friend, driving out the driveway muttering to myself about his ridiculous opinions that differed so radically from mine, on the verge of justifying getting upset or mad when it struck me like a minor version of what struck Paul on the road to Damascus. Opinions are nothing. They're not even smoke, not even thin air, not anything but mental structures built by the opinion contractor within. I came to see opinions as a way of making sense of illusion, but like in the country song about looking for love in all the wrong places, opinions limit, they don't set free.

I'm of the opinion that life is the free flowing of what's happening in our lives, allowing it to be, enjoying the spontaneity, and opinions are big rocks in the stream the water flows around that go no place, even during a major storm.

My friend regarded his unmovable stance a virtue. I believe going with the flow a virtue. Both are opinions. There may be as much or as little to his opinion as to mine. It's called making order out of chaos. We do the best we can with the parts we're given to work with. It's like we make our own memory movies as we go along.

I've come to believe, rather than have an opinion that makes good sense to my way of seeing, that all it will take to change the course of civilization that is going headlong into self-destruction is a change of attitude by everyone. A caring, understanding, loving attitude toward the people in our lives could stop all the madness heating up in the pressure cooker the earth has become. We chortle within at the likelihood of such as that ever happening, but if it doesn't, oh well. I like to believe God is seeing us through this hourglass civilization is passing through so recklessly, so without concern for consequences, and will help us. I'd like to think this feeling I have of something good in the air could be a step in God unlocking the doors to our hearts just in time.

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