Talking to someone today at work about life, our common quirks, fears ... and we talked about how right then, right at that moment when he was standing there talking to me and I was ending the typing on my keyboard, there was nothing that we could want for or fear, nothing that we could not handle. But then, when the larger picture starts to elbow in and the present becomes the future, things get mighty scary. He said that he's noticed recently how, during the part of his Sunday catholic services when everyone turns to greet each other, each usher who walks down the aisle and shakes the hands of those parishioners sitting at the ends of the pews is shaking a person's hand while looking to the next person coming up, not personally greeting and looking into the eyes of the person whose hand the usher is shaking. And this seems to me to exemplify the world right now on many scales: so many people shaking a hand while looking ahead, so many people losing the present moment. He and I agree, we fall into that these days, and we discuss how not to be this way, and soon enough we'll lose the daily opportunity to talk about these things, which is a loss we are trying to process too.