When Catholics receive their ashes on Ash Wednesday, a lot of priests will say something nice like, go forth this Lenten season and ... uh ... do good things for others. Oh, I don't know. Something like that. But in my parish it's always been, "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

I was thinking about this as I brushed my teeth yesterday morning. It had such a calming effect on me - like, a Catholic dose of the rather Buddhist notion that nothing earthly matters. It's so simple, really - be good to others, don't get attached to earthly possessions or relationships, accept that you don't know when your time is going to come, accept that you can't control external forces (which is everything except for your own thoughts). When I was a little kid up to very recently, that used to drive me bananas. Scary thought, knowing you could step off the curb into a crosswalk and be flatlined by a bus, if that's the way the play was written. You could go to sleep in perfect health and just not wake up. You could kiss your loved one goodbye in the morning and they could quite possibly never make it home for dinner - maybe they got blindsided by someone amazing and had to leave you, or maybe they got blindsided by that bus.

Okay, I've stepped over zen and into morbid, but I can back up.

It's all coming together for me. Slowly. McG's bottom line is, curb your negative thoughts. To that end I've found myself a lot of literature on how not to worry. The pre-Lent message so far seems to be, "Be good to yourself and others, focus on God, live well, stop worrying about things. Especially bad things."

The priest yesterday sort of apologized for the grimness of the message, but said he was sticking with that one instead of the flowery nice ones because it's really true, and not so grim when you think about what it really means. Your body, your nice house, your $11 million bejeweled Fantasy Bra (sorry, I read my VS catalog as religiously as I read my Newsweek), even your art - they're all dust. Eventually. Be ye kind, because in the end, that's all that matters.