Mike’s philosophy

At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, we had a lot of free time at home. My brother Michael started to draw. He’d use my iPad every night to make whatever sketch he was interested in, but eventually just decided that wasn’t fun enough after a while. One morning I thought I’d delete some unused apps, so I went through the sketch app to try and determine if there was anything worth keeping. To my surprise, there was a rather touching comic-book like pane of art with dialogue taken from the award winning, Emmy® Nominated TV series: The Good Place. It struck a chord with me so I made sure I saved them. I think they have a deserved place here within this text.

Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it; it’s height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave. And then it crashes into the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it’s one concept of death for Buddhists. The wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it’s supposed to be.

We’re all just waves in a bigger, grander ocean. And the idea is not to necessarily be the biggest wave or some sort of tsunami, but rather, it’s just to simply enjoy being a wave. We exist at a specific moment in time and we are all confined to our present. This gets deeper and deeper but the general idea remains the same: appreciate moments as life gives them to you. Cherish them and share them with others. Be grateful that you have the opportunity to wake up everyday and make stories for yourself.