Few, head to head, reconsider the game. The strategy’s failed, the tactics moot, yet the sticky residue of win and lose holds those opposing foreheads in place. Neither can see any alternative space from there: eyes locked, imagination seized up, too. We still believe we might bull through. Relenting can’t even qualify as unthinkable because it’s unimaginable from there.

The imagination’s gone by then, though, smothered beneath shear will; an ill will that never blows nothing any good. We have met and reduced each other to mere pressed meat, third-eye inspirational perspective effectively blinded from my forehead and your forehead insisting.

Whatever New Age fantasy might imagine cooperation emerging then amounts to a fairy tale in a lightning storm. Lightning trumps. Whatever Think-Tank strategy envisions eventual dominion then should be sent back for a second run through reality. No one has ever known how to pre-plan folding up the tents without achieving either a win or a lose. We are not merely stuck, but frozen. We might feel on the teetering edge between master and slave—physically, emotionally, intellectually, then finally spiritually—incapable of caving. We might as well be stone.

Stalemates seem to turn every observer into a pundit; suddenly everyone has an opinion. The price of advice plummets as its value approaches zero, yet demand soars. Nobody’s listening because no one can hear anything beyond their own senseless cheering. We champion the cause with no effect.

Someone will have to stumble, someone will just have to fall. Nobody could ever win anything after every intention has stalled. There will be no recovery for the innocence that drove two heads into the equivalent of no heads at all. Blame could continue forever and shame might well never end, no victory celebration’s nearly half as sweet as the battle that never began. Our future will carry no memory of the moment our reason stalled, though we will recall the stumble and fall that reinstalled our senses again.

The best excuse for bottomless generosity might be that it’s nearly certain to ensure the eternal avoidance of stalemates where humans turn to stone before grinding themselves into gravel beneath their feet.

©2013 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting