Archive for February 2011
All’s Quiet
No news, is good news, as the saying goes. And that is how it plays out for most of us, each and every day. …That is, on an individual scale. En masse, there are births and deaths, and every possible drama in between, happening all the time. But when all that drama gets spread out across all the people in the world, lots of us end up with days of nothing newsworthy to report. I’m okay with that for me, regardless a strange urge that lingers just below the surface, looking for some cataclysmic event overdue to break the eerie calm.
While many in the world are engaged in serious and worthy drama today, I am humbled to be able to report I have no news.
Mental Revelations
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Life, so they say, is but a game and they let it slip away. (lyrics by James Seals)
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Are we letting February slip away? It’s not like we can stop it. In two days, it will be March. The game of life is marching on whether we think it is us who are doing the playing, or are the ones being played. If you don’t feel you have the ability to make choices about your own life, you just may feel you are being played.
We always have the option of choosing to alter our thinking. Regardless how sure we are about our take on the world, there remains mystery and complexity that deserves acknowledgment. Imagine if technology were able to produce a mirror that would reveal our suppressed anger and sorrow in its reflection. It could be particularly valuable to those who proclaim themselves as having nothing to gain from professional therapy.
Could we make healthier decisions if we became better aware of underlying issues that frame our perspective? Maybe.
I am inclined to believe that our mental health is not well served by our failure to recognize what it is that has hurt or angered us. It would be a shame to let life slip away without taking a chance of bettering our health by simply altering our thinking.
Smile
Don’t be bashful. Form your features into a pleased, kind, or amused expression. Turn up the corners of your mouth. Smile.
If you are not in the grips of clinical depression, the simple act of smiling has the power to alter everything that comes after it.
You are more powerful than you give yourself credit for being.
Go ahead. Wield your smile.
Shhhhhh
I was driving home late last night after my weekly session of floorball (floor hockey played with a wiffle ball) when all of a sudden I became aware that the radio was playing unnecessarily loud, and the song at the time was not one that appealed to me in the least. I shut the radio off. The immediate transition created an impression that the quiet was quieter than the song had been loud, if that makes any sense; along the lines of “a deafening silence”.
It reminded me of an exercise I devised years ago on one of the rest days during an annual week of biking and camping with about 150 dear friends. The object is to practice becoming aware of everything that is audible in a given period of minutes. The process involves acknowledging what sound is closest and most obvious, and then disregarding that in order to move on to focus on the next sound. The priority is to strive to be able to discern the next further distant sound, ultimately culminating in what would be the input you are detecting from a source the largest distance away from you. It is all speculation, but in terms of an exercise, the reward is in the doing, and not necessarily the data obtained.
It isn’t important to know what the sound is. Just becoming aware that it is something you are hearing at that time, and being able to file it and move on, serves the purpose of this exercise.
Often times, what I discover during this process is the space between the sounds. It is there that resides, the quietest of quiets.
Why Not?
Is it the big stuff, or the little stuff, or the more obvious combination of the both of them that deserves our attention at every given moment of each and every day? There isn’t always big stuff happening and sometimes there isn’t even any small stuff. But then someone’s house burns to the ground and they lose everything. Next thing you know, someone feels emotionally injured by the way another person spoke to them. Big, and little. Sometimes we pay attention, and sometimes we don’t.
Regardless of what happens, big or small, we look out at it all from inside ourselves and measure it against our own relative perspective. Imagine if we learned to do so with an attitude of awareness that, that is what we were doing, and did so from the spiritual center of our being.
We alter everything we observe, simply by observing it. Why not alter it for the better?
Shovel Breaker
This winter has been a real shovel breaker for me. Yesterday it snowed all day. I waited to get out and work on clearing the driveway until 8:30 p.m., hoping it would be closer to the end of accumulating snowfall. Unfortunately for me, by that time we had about 15 inches of snow. It took me 2 hours to get the bulk of the day’s accumulation cleared, and we gained another inch while I was working. None of the city plows had been out yet, so there will be quite a pile to deal with at the end of the driveway this morning. I didn’t see it until I was almost out to the end of my driveway, but last night there was a car stuck in the street just at the edge of our drive. If it isn’t gone when the plow comes by, he won’t be able to clear the snow very well in the street at the end of our driveway. That will probably mean even more shoveling for me.
I wore out my favorite shovel as the metal strip ripped loose and prevented the scoop from sliding well along the asphalt. I may need to modify it by cutting off the remaining metal to at least use the plastic scoop. It isn’t important to me right now that I scrape right down to the pavement. To finish clearing the deep snow last night, I used the shovel that Cyndie purchased a year ago when I mentioned I should get a replacement for my favorite shovel. I could see it was beginning to show wear. The only thing similar about the pusher shovel that Cyndie brought home is that it has a black scoop and a yellow handle. It is metal and MUCH heavier than my perfect snow pusher. I wasn’t previously aware how much of a shovel snob I am. But after trying to do the same job with a different tool, I realized how much the tool I was originally using allowed my technique to work as well as it does.
I also broke my plastic blade shovel that I use on our wood deck, when I took it up on the roof to battle ice dams back in December. So this winter has officially taken out two of our shovels. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I saw a news item that mentioned this winter as our second snowiest to date. I think the record height of the snow piles on either side of our driveway serve as corroboration for that report.
Some Days
Some days, you feel like a rock. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to feel heavy or unbalanced…
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An Eye for the Game
A sports peeve: One oft-used sports phrase is that an athlete is prized for his/her ability to “see the floor/field/ice”.
How can that NOT be a skill that every player who advances to college or professional team sports competition is exceptional at!? It’s a team sport, after all. How can they not already know where the play is going, where the teammates are moving from/to.
I can see how some players have specialized skills and can be a great defender, an outstanding shooter/scorer, a great ball handler, or be exceptionally fast, but why wouldn’t all players be able to see the play develop and have a sense where to go next?
Do professional coaches really have to deal with athletes that don’t see the play?
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There is an aspect of a hockey game, and to a similar degree, a soccer match, that is a very large part of “seeing the play.” It is an important thing for the players to grasp, and for fans to recognize. It can be described as action that doesn’t happen.
One way it is detectable is when a player chooses to retreat into his defensive zone. That option to retreat is in place of several options that a player doesn’t choose. Being able to see all the options that the smart player didn’t take, makes watching a game a lot more interesting.
There is also an aspect of this occurring in the offensive zone. There are a good number of times that a player won’t take a shot due to the risk of the puck getting knocked back out and play turning into an odd-man rush for the opposing team.
An uniformed spectator is not able to interpret the things that are not happening, which are mixed in with the obvious visible activity that is playing out.
I can see how fans might not have a highly tuned ability to see the play, but I don’t understand how any player at a high level of competition in team sports could ever lack that sports sense. Well, except for the guys that get hired just because they are good in fights.
Relative Something 