Reflections
A Monday Morning Meditation
Life as the ultimate value
He sipped his espresso on the balcony, looking up the hill at the steel roof of the clubhouse silhouetted against the blue morning sky.
The distant hum of the highways came up from the other side of the hills that sheltered his apartment from the teeming city all around it. He thought of all the people on those highways, going to meetings in tall glass skyscrapers, to schoolyards with chattering children, to coffee shops with their morning rush of customers, to airports with their boarding lines, and he felt his heart rise with the energy of the newborn world at daybreak.
The coffee was rich, dark, without any bitterness, and — with the cool air and the sunlight and the hum of the highways — filled him with hope for the day. But he put the working day and its tasks aside for now, and let his mind lie still as waves of sensation lapped blissfully at the shore of his consciousness.
Suddenly the cry of a baby pierced his reverie and a young couple walked into view and stood on the sidewalk. They were young and the girl was fair-skinned and pretty and had a kind and maternal face. They were probably just a bit younger than he — he who had never been married and still felt as young as the dawn.
Soon an Uber came and the man took the baby from the woman’s arms. She kissed the child and baby-talked to it reassuringly, then hopped in the passenger seat, leaving the man and child looking after the car as it rolled slowly down the drive and out towards the freeways beyond.
As the man carried the child back to their apartment, two birds flew down from their nest in a bare tree. They too were a young couple, he thought, and would welcome their own children in the swift-coming Spring.
And for what purpose? To what end the highways and the office buildings and the coffee shops and the babies and the young couples? To none at all. Because life was good for its own sake. Fresh coffee and fresh mornings and fresh newborn babies needed no justification. People would be having coffee and carrying babies and taking cars out onto the sunlit highways until the earth dried up and the stars burnt out. And then it would all happen again in some new way — on and on for aeons without end. Someone had once told him that heaven was goodness itself, enjoyed for all eternity. And he thought in this moment that heaven was not a far-away place, but the world unfurling itself before him.
