Archive for January 2010
Change Perspective
I am always amazed by the insights I gain from simply getting airborne. When the day is dreary gray down here on the ground, it often feels as if the sunshine doesn’t even exist. When you climb through the clouds and realize how thin they can be and how brilliant the sunshine is on the top side, the difference is startling. Even though we know better, knowing and seeing really are different things. It is amazingly sunny just above that water vapor cloud that materializes overhead.
I noticed something else during my weekend trip to Chicago. On a normal day in my life, I see a very small and predictable number of people. And that gets repeated again and again for days and months. Other than the days I go to the club to play soccer, where I do see a relatively broad number of strangers –over and over each week– I normally just see the small number of people I work with, and my wife at home in the evenings. Being in Chicago over the weekend and using public transportation, walking the streets, going to shows and restaurants and bars, seeing such a wide variety of people, revealed to me how small my world has become of late.
I think it is a good exercise to become aware of such things. We form a lot of opinions based on our perspective of the world, but it behooves us to consider how often our perspective is limited in scope. In that case, it would be wise that we not make our judgments about issues of the world any wider than the actual scope of our perspectives.
Trip Report
Public Art in Pioneer Court, God Bless America, Sculptor: J. Steward Johnson - Installed: Dec, 2008
Did I mention that I was going to Chicago for the weekend? Cyndie and I and our good friends, Bob & Kris and Mike & Barb, reunited for a January weekend in Chicago because someone spotted low airfare specials again. Our calculations revealed that the last time we did this was 3 years ago, in 2007, when we attended a performance of the play “Wicked” and watched a downtown 3D fireworks show over the river. The keynote event this year was a show at the Second City comedy theater. It was a gas! A bit tricky to discern if we were witnessing an early performance of someone who would someday show up on SNL or make it big in the movies, but the ensemble was very capable and highly entertaining and the skits were definitely funny. They finally got me laughing to tears, even though the topic of the cab driver explaining to the imaginary passengers (the audience) behind him, why the fares keep going up, wasn’t specifically that funny. It was his delivery. The timing he executed to deliver the repeated intro line for the next gag seemed to do the trick for me. Throughout the night they employed the craft of weaving independent skits, on-again, off-again, among other scenes, to squeeze extra laughs out of one idea, just by returning to it later to add one more comment or interaction. Very effective. Very funny. Highly entertaining!
My mauled open-face Reuben at Lou Mitchell's
We also visited Lou Mitchell’s Restaurant and Bakery at the start of Route 66, played $3000 guitars that are delivered upon request to the rooms of guests of the Hard Rock Hotel where we stayed, connected with our son, Julian, and other friends at the ESPN Zone to watch the NFL Vikings defeat Dallas, and followed a tip to a 1920’s speakeasy style cocktail bar, The Violet Hour, and then Francesca’s Forno in the Wicker Park neighborhood. We ate too much and tried to walk some of it off, but often took cabs or the CTA. For a person who doesn’t drink alcohol, I spent more time in bars over the weekend than I regularly visit in a couple of years. The Violet Hour, in particular, makes a seriously enticing ‘mocktail’.
Thank you, Southwest Airlines, for giving us these opportunities. They did a great job. And, once again, Chicago was a great host, even given the gray and somewhat chilly January climate. We are talking about considering altering our focus to start watching for cheap January airfare deals to warm destinations, but then, everybody does that. That’s the very reason it ends up being so cheap to go somewhere like Chicago.
The entrance to the Violet Hour. Seriously.
Time to Come Home!
I’m sure it was probably a wonderful time, but I always love returning home again. If I’ve taken adequate notes, I’ll be able to write all the gory details for your entertainment later this week, but no promises. Maybe what happened in Chicago will need to stay in Chicago. Who knows what I was up to in these shots from the trip of January 2007.
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Go Vikes!
I have no idea what it will be like to watch my home football team compete in a playoff game when I am located in a rival city. Da Bears are out of it, so they may as well cheer us on. I’ll let you know how it turned out after I get back. Here is another shot from our January Chicago trip of two years ago. Are we having fun yet?
Off to Chicago
We’re headed to Chicago for the weekend with friends. Weather should be pleasant for us to wreak our silly havoc on the unsuspecting town. Reports to follow…
A Moment on Friday
Ok, so it’s Friday. Next thing you know, I’ll be in Chicago for the weekend. My days are flying by and I’m not sure I’m even there to experience them. Any exercise I have been able to practice on being aware of the present moment of late has been shrouded in as much fog as the landscape in the twin cities this week. Just yesterday, as I was driving home, I realized that I had no conscious recollection of the last few miles of freeway I had just been on. Part of me quickly flashes to a concern over what I could have just driven over or glaring errors I could have made for having been so unaware, even as my logic conveys the obvious probability that the reason I don’t remember it is because of the very fact that there wasn’t any obstacle to drive over nor cause me to err. It’s far from the pinnacle of being ‘in the moment’.
Meanwhile, I get a sense of how petty my concerns are when tragedies like the earthquake in Haiti fill the news. I really relate to the level of suffering it must be to endure the trauma of the incident and then when it is over, to have nothing in the way of basic services available to turn to. In the first day alone, I would be at such a loss for the simple drink of clean water. If I lost everything and have no job to go to, I gotta believe that in the very least, I would lend a hand to whatever situation was visible before me. But no matter what I end up finding to do, it’s thirst that would seem to be without remedy. If, and when, drinking water does show up, how do you get enough for yourself and for everyone around you?
It’s always great to see the world respond to tragedies with outpourings of support. Whenever this kind of response happens, the thought occurs to me of how sad it is that we can’t seem to rally the same kind of rapid, effective, collective reaction for global issues of suffering from human-produced disasters of war and hunger and poverty. It takes a devastating natural disaster.
It’s like my ongoing lament that we wait until a person dies to suddenly all gush overwhelming acknowledgment for their accomplishments. Wouldn’t it be nice if we did that before the people are gone?
Tell someone you appreciate them today. And consider a contribution to an international relief organization.
Plans Afoot
How about a little status report? There are a variety of plans in the works. The closest one to happening is a little weekend trip to Chicago in a couple of days for Cyndie and me and 4 friends. We purchased tickets to Second City comedy theater and may connect with Julian on Sunday to watch the Vikings game at a sports bar. That adventure will come and go in a blink. But there’s more.
February brings the return of a winter tradition for the extended Hays family where we gather for a weekend at the wonderful vacation getaway of Cyndie’s family in Hayward, Wisconsin. It just may be my first opportunity to test the new mechanism I received to help in building an igloo. It will also be a weekend of eating, laughing and gaming in the warmth of a wood fire with siblings and cousins, both young and old. But the best is yet to come.
Many people have been asking me what my next big travel adventure is going to be since the trek in the Himalayas is behind me. I haven’t had any plans to answer with, until now. Cyndie and I have decided to take some time off work and travel to Portugal next fall to visit a friend and his family on their farm. This is someone I have not met in person before. We are both members of the same online virtual community and first discovered each other in a discussion about trees. We both have a passion for planting trees. Over the years we have communicated often and developed a bond that computer communication allows people to achieve, regardless the thousands of miles that separate them.
Prior to that, I intend to participate in my usual June event that I’ve done most of the past 16 years, the annual Jaunt with Jim week of biking along with my sister and about 150 of our closest friends.
All of it becomes fodder for stories to be told and pictures to share, so there is hope for new and interesting posts here that I expect might fit the pattern of being relative to something for you loyal readers. I’ll see what I can do to capture it for you. Thanks for tuning in!
Finding Calm Amid Chaos
Just a peek of something that isn’t snow to go with our January warm spell, but one that represents the chaos that I’m feeling as the many needles of things calling for my attention seem scattered all over the place. I just have to figure out a way to perceive them as belonging just the way they lie. I have to overcome my urge to see them all become arranged in some sort of order and discover the peace of allowing normal to be observed in the usual chaos of things.
I want to become better able to associate the times when things seem to be getting stressful as okay, just as they are. Sure, things are incredibly busy and seem chaotic, but if I frame my perceptions of chaos as normal, maybe my reaction and management of events can be more balanced and calm. I wouldn’t mind learning to perceive days that get overly busy as individual moments that aren’t as stressful as they seem to be when taken all at once. I think that would be a good skill to master.
Permission to Die
Two nights ago I had a very interesting dream in which I was somehow informed in advance that I would die. The dream impression was that I learned about my impending death before going to sleep and that it meant I would not wake up the next day. I was very excited for this opportunity to know in advance and was looking forward to what my departure from this human body would be like. In the dream, I think Cyndie must have been right there as I learned of my fate and I wanted to share my excitement with her, but I sensed she would not be happy about it and that dampened my gleefulness a bit. Then the thrill truly waned when my thoughts turned to having a chance to tell my kids. How could they be happy with my news?
After I woke and mulled over the sense I got from the dream, it occurred to me how obvious this scenario relates to folks who really are dying. The people who are okay with the prospect of their own death are still woven into the lives of others who often don’t want them to go. Imagine the power that wields.
It brings to my mind the situation that never made any sense to me, where a country needs to police its borders to keep their own citizens from leaving. I have a very difficult time reconciling the way of governing that involves armed guards stationed to force people who don’t want to be there to stay, regardless.
It is radically extreme to apply that thinking to life and death, but in a way, that is how it is. We go to great lengths to keep people from dying, whether they want to, or not. We have a wall up that surrounds the living. Obviously, the wrench in this line of thinking would be the mentally ill. It would not be prudent to allow depressives to have access to convenient exit from life for the misery they experience from untreated ailments. But if it were possible to extract that from the rest of the idea, it would be an interesting mental exercise to work out what the world would be like if somehow there were no strings attached to the decision to choose death.
It would take away one of the big tools of the criminals, threatening people’s lives all the time to get their way. “Your money or your life” wouldn’t work if the response was always, “Oh, go ahead, take my life. My family said I’m free to go any time.”
Relative Something 