| The best kinds of creation and free lunches combine both. People who invent new and improved ways to give, are high on my saint list.
What is so sad about the mere fact that "There Is No Free Lunch" even made it into the popular slang, is the built in assumption that accepting any gift will incur a debt. That is SUCH a low-tech way of thinking about giving. The best ways of doing so, involve understanding how complex the outcomes of giving are. How the ripples do ripple. And that giving ultimately will ripple on back to you, like the California hippies say; "What goes around, comes around."
I could get quite Christian about this...Christianity has a lot of good dialogue going for it. The best parts of it are all about priming the giving pump, though. And the forgiving pump, too. Sometimes I think the main thing wrong with Christianity is that it bit off more than it can chew. Judaism, in its own funny way, is more realistic about humans. It doesn't expect quite so much.
And Islam? I'm really not sufficiently clued in to Islam. But it must have a lot going for it, since it's currently taking over the world. And then there are the Mormons, who are doing a bang-up job of taking over Americans.
So, where is the free lunch in all of that? Anywhere? I have no sense that Islam involves any free lunch. Judaism would like to make you lunch, and it might be free, or might not be. Christianity would like you to believe there is free lunch, but they keep moving the table.
Well, there are other religions..the Eastern ones. The Buddhists worship the lunch, because it's part of the whole world, in all its lunchness. The Hindus may have issues about what the lunch is made of...(an aside here, I really am not hip on the Hindus and have no desire to diss them. All things considered, they seem to be relatively good about not relentlessly starting wars?)
Perhaps the best way to approach this is to start up front with the assumption that there is no lunch? That the Lunch is just an illusion? Just a dream, the lunch. A dream of a thought that we are, just thoughts.
I've long thought that way of looking at the universe was oddly consistent, and dog knows I've been looking for consistency ever since my acid-driven religious experience up in the attic when I was sixteen (and my, wasn't that pretty? Lunch was the last thing on my mind).
The problem with that is so obvious and simple - where do you go then? Where do you go after the religious experience? Not everybody winds up legs folded, sitting in caves, laughing at their acolytes.
That's the question I've been asking myself ever since. Where do you go?
Then I got back to this "There Is No Free Lunch" thing, and maybe that's where I went. Into the eternal fight to prove that there can be a free lunch, and if you don't think it's possible, well then EAT me.
I'm 52 now and if I live long enough, I will get old. I like to keep ahead of the curve. I'm mathematically inclined, and I figure the curve is going to lead ultimately to a lunch failure. It will move on beyond lunch, then.
It will be okay, though. Because then, we will have breakfast!
And who doesn't like breakfast?
Croissants, anyone? |
