Attending
Eckstein
in September
Top: Boys from Eckstein's awesome 2023 Basketball Team sporting school colors.
I made this observation on my previous website as an afterthought buried deep in a long article. When it is placed in the context of this body of work I noticed how important it would have been to learn much of what I write here at that time. I really don’t think many of the important things in life take that long to understand. You really don’t need decades to experience the world but for someone to highlight several main points a lot sooner. I listen to an app that collects wisdom teachings from several people all in one spot. The founder’s reason for starting it was to provide a tool that wasn’t available when he was growing up so he had to go on long quests to find it. Too bad we couldn’t think about this topics earlier in life. Maybe I didn’t think of my teen years as being more important but it is clear now that is the case.
People spend most of their lives on one of two sides of the fence; having practically no knowledge of the world as a child or being an adult putting up with the doldrums of a pretty similar existence from year to year, one day after another. We just accept that learning can slow down at some point even when the extent of crippling ignorance remains so great. Being an adult is rarely as unique of an experience due to having less rites of passage. For the Covid lockdowns to turn life upside down and break this stagnant boring system apart is fantastic! Most of life is absurd anyways, you enter a career and independent living by thinking the society you grew up in makes at least a slight amount of sense. Then you live it and realize how nuts normality is.
What I liked about school was the thrill of getting to the end of a multi-year experience and then accomplishing something like a degree. I am glad this website project was like this too. It had a lot of work leading towards one big finale! It was a marker in the road which many years of pushing led up to. Focusing on bigger goals really has a big pay off!
Below is a poem that I in part wrote while coming back from the Eckstein Rummage Sale. I stopped into a coffee shop and these were my thoughts about a building that largely hasn't changed since its inception and how I contrasted that with the Buddhist teaching of the illusion of the unchanging self and my trying to figure out what that means. It occurred to me that it might fit into this page. Maybe over time I will rework how well it flows into everything else here as of now it is a very last minute type of idea.
Years have I longed to get to a conclusion
what the Buddha endeavored to inculcate;
the self doesn’t exist… the self it is only an illusion.
Part of me seems so the same and stagnate.
Is myself as a child someone that is no longer here?
Or am I like the rings on a tree -
Child, adult outwards this remains to me so unclear.
Of all things can I not explain the familiarity of me?
I have an interest in locales that don’t change
with the list nowadays becoming daily much less.
Now at school nothing there did they rearrange,
I count that a tremendous unintended bless.
My early kid mindset is little at this point left.
Seemed I was moving to a much higher scheme
with tireless expanding and long earned deft.
What became of that long ago dream?
On the next few pages I talk about some of the latest happenings which Eckstein has been up to. One of the positive sides of the lockdowns is that this content was posted online so I can see what they are doing. They even made a movie about how the school functioned in the lockdowns. I start the section with a game where they won with a second on the clock! I was glad to find out about that so I could go to a couple of their games when I was in town. I've been to my High School's games later on but a guess forgot Jr. High even did games outside of regular PE class.
