Winning One for the Guppie.

I had a win today.

After months of searching for the solution to a problem with our catalog purchasing system, I suddenly had an idea. Not a revelation, not some epiphany, just…an idea. I tried something I hadn’t tried before, and I found the root of the problem, in a place I hadn’t looked before. Three minutes later, I had the errant coding corrected, and the problem was solved.

I could have kicked myself for taking so long to figure it all out, as I often do. I did take a long time in putting one piece of advice, one hint, one clue next to another, adding 2 and 2 and getting the requisite 4. Sure, I could have kicked myself for tardiness, but today, for once, I took the win for a win and called it a day.

Jim Morrison is credited with the pithy observation that “No one gets out of here alive.” I’m not at all sure that’s original to the Sixties rocker; a young man named Siddartha figured that out some 23 hundred-some-odd years ago, and made a rather pretty religion out of the idea. But what Morrison’s phrase teaches you, to use a more scientific turn of phrase, is that entropy is a bitch. Jesus of Nazareth died. Siddartha died. Socrates asked questions, taught philosophy, drank hemlock and died. We all die. So what’s the point?

The point is that every win, every little victory,says life matters. In the cold dark universe, even a tiny light is something other than darkness, and even if it’s snuffed out, even if it’s overwhelmed by the emptiness, its loss doesn’t matter nearly as much as its once tiny, brilliant, perfect light. It is for a moment, was for a moment, not dark in the universe.

So celebrate the days you solve a problem; the days you pay your bills; the days you make someone smile; the days you hold someone’s hand when they cry on your shoulder; the days when someone holds your hand when every breath is an ache. It doesn’t matter that there is pain in the world. It doesn’t matter even that the universe is a cold, heartless bitch of a creation, and that nobody gets out alive. It matters that you are, that you feel, that you love, that sometimes you laugh.

The light needs no justification.