In the world of universal discourse there are inevitably some current themes all writers come back to.  The most favorite of these is, of course, oneself.  Carol says that when I write about things I know I am more interesting.  But, writing about me can get old just like any other overworked topic.  I recognize that in my writing I keep coming back to recurrent themes just because they seem to never go away and dominate the thinking of thinking people.  Some of these are crucial to the welfare of the people and the planet (say, there’s a good title) and only get old when you keep hitting the same notes on the scale of absolute terror that bad things are happening to the people and the world will fall apart (may that be far in the future!).

But, in thinking about recurrent themes I notice that we always fall back on sports, recreation and entertainment.  These, in addition to advertisements make up the bulk of newspapers.  So, add a little hysteria that the “sky is falling, the sky is falling”, there is the genre of alarm that bad things happen to good people.  Looking over the list of those bad things you find that good people are the fodder that feed the bad and the things bad people use to accomplish their nefarious ends are: war, hunger, pestilence and – eventually – a sad and lonely death.

The bright spots in the universe of discourse are those nice people whom we all admire and sometimes too late recognize their contribution to our civilization.  We lose them and the anchor to morality and belief systems that we all resort to when in times of troubles.  We are in a time of trouble now and are in the position of “I’ve fallen down and can’t get up!” That is another recurrent theme.  We human folks cause ourselves so many troubles that this is a topic we all want to talk about all the time.  You get a couple of us old folks together and all we can talk about is our ailments and the faux cures we have tried to make us feel better.  There is nothing like taking off decades of abusing ourselves and starting over.  But, that will never happen.

I happen to like the subject of the “next life”.  That is one of the vexing things about human thinking that set us apart from other life forms.  We THINK that we will have another chance of life after we kill off this one.  I add my voice to all those who actually believe they will live again in some utopian place where they will join all those they loved who “passed” before them.  My favorite is the “reincarnation” types who think we will be reborn again in some other life form.  Of course, you have to begin at the beginning and restart by being some insect or bug and then go up the ladder to being human sometime in the future.  But, I won’t bet on this one. There are recurrent themes. Some like oil, poverty and unequal treatment pop up and we never have enough time to fully solve any of them.