So, I think you have to have a world view that is simple but true in order to navigate being.  I have no idea how I'd describe mine, but it feels necessary that I keep trying.  Many, maybe most, say their religion belongs in that spot.  I've studied so many, looking for the most right one for me.  Instead, I've made peace with the fact that none so far, for me, have adequately illuminated and celebrated the mystery, or even come close.  Neither has science alone, as magnificent and mysterious as it is.

I would never choose to reinvent the wheel.  It takes so much unnecessary time more happily spent using that wheel.  But mostly so far, I guess, my world view is that I can't fully believe tidy world views. Yet I also refuse to have a world view of refusal alone.  Refusing to believe this, denying that, denigrating the other versions.  Being more right and righteous than my poor, deluded, sinful, ugly neighbor is not the way I want to be.  Time will run out and I would have to look back someday and say in horror, 'That is how I used my precious time?'  Nope. Instead, I'm letting the mystery be.  I'm OK that all of us grasp a bit of it, and I'm loving the mystery, trusting that any and all attempts so far to describe it are woefully, humanly inadequate, but that still there is an organizing intelligence to admire and episodically glimpse.  An organizing intelligence that includes suffering and joy, light and dark, still and frantic, terrifying and peaceful.

And creating.  Your self and your way of being is creating something.  While you are being human, knowingly or not, you get to do that.  It's amazing.  My overall intention is to create a life that is loving and joyful, accepting and peaceful in the midst of pain and horror and busy and beauty and indifference.  I hold that in place and then ride through the day, immersed in whatever is that I perceive through the flawed lense that I own now and that will change as I pass through.  Boredom, sadness, beauty, storm.  Suffering.  Joy.  I know whatever it is will be temporary.  Like me.  And everything and everybody.  I'm OK with that.  In fact, I love that.  So much.

Way to be

 I am intensely interested in how we manage to be while we are so temporarily human, where suffering lives right beside joy.  So many people focus on either one or the other.  I suffer, therefore I am who I am.  Or I am happy, therefore I am who I am. That's pretty normal, because intense experiences grab our attention for lots of good reasons.  But the intense periods always pass.  And anyway, the thing about being human (or any other being with consciousness - I wonder a lot about all intelligent beings like elephants and dolphins and dogs) is that we can expand our awareness beyond the single experiences of intense suffering or joy while we are enveloped in them.  And when we're not immersed in the intense experience, we ponder why the world is like it is - full of such breathtaking beauty right alongside random, stunning cruelty and undeserved pain.  The facts are the facts, and we can shift focus, deny, distract, rationalize in order to live with them.  But it is a thing to wrap your head around the why of this set up.

Far greater minds who have poetically performed the magic of sharing a gorgeous, complex, working world view. And yet, we still each have to figure out for ourselves how we will be in this moment.  I have the mechanics of it, I think.  I do choose joy whenever and however I can, right along with all of the ugly stuff.  Not to demean or disrespect pain, not to pretend it isn't there.  When pain is present, I try to open fully to it rather than escape it, because one thing about this deal is every bit of it is temporary. But so far, I've managed to acknowledge suffering fully and choose joy still.  Also.  So, that's what I'm doing and lots of others do too.  But really, how?