I was reading a blog on my favorite blog site, http://thegreatone22.wordpress.com/ and I was semi-thrilled when, as I read along, I realized that I was being paraphrased. The blog reads:

… I’m not in favor of the Israelis and against the Palestinians or vice versa. Personally, I believe that both groups are completely and utterly (up to their eyeballs) full of crap. The Israelis with their “the chosen people” BS and the Palestinians with their Allah-crap; both groups are just religious fanatics who have been fighting and killing each other for thousands of years and will probably continue to do so until the end of time.

All of you religious people, especially the Jews, Muslims and Christians, need to stop, THINK, and lighten up. As a life-long friend of mine and very bright individual often says: “It doesn’t make a difference…” This statement is simple yet brilliant. “It doesn’t make a difference” folks, believe what you will… It just doesn’t make a difference. Once again, “it doesn’t make a difference.” TGO.

I have often thought that my philosophical point of view that, “nothing makes a difference”, is always being misconstrued by this bloger, my closest friend. I’d like to clarify that:

We are a species that are too cocooned by self-comforting habits and ways of being; habits of avoidance, denial, defensiveness, and so on, and one of those is this conscientious search for, “what difference do we make”. No other life forms get stuck on, get paralyzed on the questions, “Do we make a difference”, “Does anything make a difference”.

I remember as a kid, finding an ant hill, trampling all over it, returning a day or two later and finding rebuilt all over again. I’d trample it all over again only to find that they would rebuild all over again, and so forth and so forth. The ants never stop to wonder if it made a difference. If this happened enough to a human they would undoubtedly stop for fear that their efforts don’t make a difference. Even though we seem like we are searching for a difference, the difference doesn’t show up. We continue killing each other; we continue betraying our wives, our husbands. We live as if it doesn’t make a difference because when the difference we are searching for does not show up, we get stuck.

I say, lets just all agree to the fact that, nothing makes a difference and move on. If we would truly grasp… If we would understand, truly get, that nothing makes a difference, at that point we would also grasp that if, nothing makes a difference, then that fact itself, that nothing makes a difference, would not make a difference.

Can you dig it? That, nothing makes a difference doesn’t make a difference. And here is where the redeeming value lies and what my friend misconstrues. It does not make a difference that nothing makes a difference. We can choose to live life, as if, it makes a difference.

Live life, “as if”, it makes a difference. If, as individuals, as cultures, as people with different religious beliefs, as societies with different political systems, we lived life, “as if”, it makes a difference, then, and only then, would life make a difference and if life makes a difference, tell me reader, would it really make a difference that nothing makes a difference?

If, we lived life as if it makes a difference, does it make a difference that nothing makes a difference?