The Deep End

i want to lurk around dark corners.

i want to jump in a fast mov­ing car, and speed away.

i want to sell the goods in a pawn shop.

i want to hold the knife to the neck and then back out of the room, slowly.

i want to get away with it.

Where does moral­ity come from? We agree with some­one about some things that are either good or bad. Some things seem to be known to me, in me. I can’t talk my way out of the wrong­ness of murder…unless it is Hitler. Then maybe. I know not to lie and I don’t want to lie…unless the truth reveals where you are hid­ing for your life. Mur­der is not good for the species, but maybe it is good for Hitler because mur­der­ing Hitler seems to be good for the species. We are encoded with the knowl­edge of good and bad, maybe, to pro­tect the race.

This kind of think­ing gets tir­ing. Hav­ing God define it all is eas­ier, but then we have to won­der about God aban­don­ing his son on an instru­ment of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, mur­dered. This is our model of love: the blood had to flow. But this is not a les­son we gen­er­ally want to teach on play­grounds. It is why it was so con­fus­ing for me as a kid. God left Jesus to die in agony so that I could go to heaven and live in par­adise, and so that my sins would stop being offen­sive. But wait, it is all made ok because Jesus beat death and so the suf­fer­ing resulted in power over death. I always, when I was lit­tle (and now again that I am older and think­ing clearly), thought, that it was kind of cheat­ing because God knew that Jesus would rise again, and so did Jesus. I don’t know how we reap a moral­ity out of this story. Thomas is vil­i­fied for doubt­ing the res­ur­rec­tion, but most par­ents, mine included, would have told me to stop fib­bing if I said I saw a man walk out of the grave. I think moral­ity is like the flip­ping coin, the weather vane. It is not noth­ing, but it is also not immov­able. Which side of the pool we swim in, deep or shal­low, depends on where the rope is placed. At least that is how it was at the park where I grew up. Whether it really was deep depended on how tall you were, but the rope made the rule and the life­guard placed the rope. This is a tir­ing topic. I don’t know exactly what is right and wrong (and I hon­estly, kind of don’t care – jump­ing in the get away car sounds like a fully lived life in a way), but I know gen­er­ally, and that works most of the time.

Here is a moral­ity to try: Be real. Do your best. Con­sider gen­eros­ity. Show up. Break some rules some times.

Moral­ity is less impor­tant than love, and way less inter­est­ing. I was telling my friend recently that love is the thin string that holds the bal­loon called me, here in this life. With­out that con­nec­tion, the hurt of the truth of our alone­ness would lift me right away…and I would wel­come the journey.