Posts Tagged ‘Perceptions’
Freaky Swing
We are living it. Is there some way to fully comprehend ‘crazy’ when we are smack dab in the middle of it? The weather drama of well-predicted impacts from a warmer climate keeps playing out right before our very eyes.
I recently watched two movies about real events that happened in my lifetime. The first was a documentary about the disastrous last flight of the space shuttle Challenger and the second was an actor-depicted retelling of the GameStop stock adventures that happened during the pandemic.
When I see these kinds of movies, I struggle to recapture my perceptions of the events at the time they were playing out. It all comes up rather blurry in my mind compared to the clear and orderly hindsight offered in such films.
If someone eventually makes a movie in the future depicting all the series of weird weather, fires, flooding, and souped-up storms we have been experiencing, will it come across as more explicitly obvious than how we perceive it now? It should.
I suspect it will make us all look bad for how slow or ultimately ineffective we were in reducing carbon emissions.
On Tuesday, it warmed to 53°F by afternoon, and then clouds rolled in bringing snow, gale-force winds, and a drop in temperature to a mere 4°F by yesterday morning.
The average high for the Twin Cities is 35 for the coming weekend. We are expecting temperatures in the 50s and 60s. What a whiplash.
The horses didn’t seem overly ruffled by the extreme temperature swing overnight Tuesday. By the time Asher and I showed up at the barn in the morning yesterday, the wild winds that made eerie sounds all night long had calmed significantly.
The surface of the driveway had a wicked glaze over it. The truck delivering bags of feed almost didn’t make the corner when turning into our driveway. Luckily, she stopped before sliding all the way off the pavement.
By noon, the bright sunshine had cleared off most of the asphalt surface.
Today is the occasion of Leap Day. February has been so unusual weather-wise, the ‘every-4-years’ addition of one day hardly seems worth mentioning.
Not that I’d notice it happened if you showed me a movie about it three years from now.
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Old Schoolmates
Last night, I traveled back in time with a small gathering of guys I went to high school with. It’s an annual holiday event of simply showing up at a designated establishment at a given hour for beverages and a few hours of catching up and recalling escapades from our youth.
Sort of a tiny fraction of a high school reunion. Certainly much easier to plan and pull off. We met at Fat Pants Brewery in Eden Prairie.
It is a little crazy-making for me because it is usually the only time I see most of them in a year. My connection with them is from when we were teenagers, so that remains my mental reference, while I am looking at us all in our mid-60s. I can’t deny having several conversations about our age, health, ailments, and end-of-life contemplations.
When reaching the point in life where it becomes obvious that one is closer to death than to one’s birth, health conversations flow rather naturally.
These are people who I ran with across old people’s lawns and got yelled at (metaphorically), and now we are the ones telling kids to get off our lawn, so to speak. While hanging out with this bunch, I felt a certain appreciation for our shared experience of growing up without cell phones. These are my people, regardless all our variety of differences.
One thing that I’m struggling to comprehend after our visit is what the heck happened to us all between the 1970s and 2023. I’m afraid it’s mostly all a blur. Somewhere in there we raised kids and worked careers but it almost seems like just incidental anecdotes at this point.
After several hours passed in a blink, holiday greetings were exchanged, and one by one we headed back into our real worlds for another year. Something about that feeds my yearning to be able to participate in this ritual each December.
It’s a little adventure of stepping out of our present lives and spending a few fleeting moments with older versions of our younger selves one night of the year.
It feels very much like what Christmas is all about.
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What Again
It’s back again! A fresh new edition of everyone’s favorite image-guessing game. It’s simple to play. All you need to do is guess what is depicted in the image below.
Do you trust your first impression, or ponder the possibilities? Can you hold off long enough to wait for the answer to come to you, or will you look for the solution right away?
You are in charge, but it is strongly recommended you come up with some kind of guess for yourself before clicking on the image to find out what this could possibly be. Guess your best, and enjoy the mental exercise! What are you looking at?
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Holiday Monday
Today is Labor Day in the U.S., a holiday that alters my life very little at this point. We will drive home after a fabulous weekend on the water on a day when high heat is expected to be baking our part of the planet once again. I’m not getting ready for a new school year or returning to a workplace routine tomorrow, both fall milestones I dealt with for most of my life.
It means a lot to me to not take the benefit of being retired for granted. I feel ecstatic to have the freedom to choose where I will direct my attention every day. It’s unlikely that I will notice that today is a holiday. I expect I will notice that the recent dirt landscaping along our driveway deserves my attention.
Now that I think of it, I may notice a little holiday traffic on the route south. Maybe a line at the Dairy Queen in Cumberland.
Not knowing how I would spend all of my time at the lake over the weekend, I brought my wood sculpting stuff and a guitar. I didn’t bring my bike. I didn’t even open my guitar case and I barely got started on sculpting before being interrupted and putting it away. I guess I spent more time at the pickleball court than expected.
Oh, um…, I got called out yesterday on that claim of “winning” the “tournament” after playing only one game on Saturday. We didn’t show up to play until after the appointed start time and the team with the dinner reservation had won two games by the time we took on the losing team.
Jennifer…, we stand corrected. You and Charlie deserve to claim that (virtual) trophy.
Steve and I played five or six games yesterday and won all of them, except one. That one we lost 11-0. I blame the wind.
The floating inflated water contraptions have been brought in for the season and buoys tied to the anchors. We are ready for summer at the lake to be declared done for another year.
The next visit to the lake place will feel that much more like fall. I wonder how soon the temperature will get the memo.
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Transition Month
August seems like a transition month. It doesn’t really stand alone as a destination month that we look forward to arriving. Other spring and summer months really carry their own weight (my local geographic region-centric take). April showers and May flowers. Everything about June is great. July being smack dab in the middle of summer and including the U.S. Independence Day makes it the jewel of them all.
Then August arrives and the shortening of days becomes more noticeable and the onset of fall sports training camps begin opening. Everything about the month tends to point toward the arrival of September when sports seasons start and schools begin classes.
Sure, locally grown sweet corn becomes available in August, but we’ve been watching fields growing all summer long so it just doesn’t seem like an exclusively August thing.
Cyndie arrived home yesterday and Asher and I were both thrilled to see her again. She gathered produce from her garden and reported that her trumpet vine is going to flower. Her new pond vacuum arrived so she assembled that and gave our landscape pond a serious going-over.
While she was opening the mail and packages that had accumulated, she noticed one was for me. I hadn’t even looked. It was my tent rainfly from The North Face!
I had received no prior communication from them since sending it off to Texas for assessment. They did what I hoped they would, and what I wouldn’t have been able to achieve if I tried to do it myself. They completely resealed all the seams like new.
The North Face has made me very happy once again. Such incredible support to one of their customers!
It’s got me thinking that August is a really great month after all and deserves to be appreciated on its own merits.
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My Reality
Each day when I describe details of my experiences it is a function of a basic tenet of writing: write what you know. One thing I know about is the perceptions I have of the activities of my days. Yesterday, I turned my back on the NCAA Women’s national championship game when it became obvious to me that Iowa would not beat LSU and I went out to tend to the horses.
A glance at the reading from our outdoor thermometer surprised me with the number 51. Looking for a second source, I opened a weather app to see what it offered for a current temperature. The reading from Red Wing, MN –twenty miles to our south– was 57°F! I did not expect this level of warming yesterday. The new snow remaining on the ground from the blizzard Friday night was quickly being transformed into water. Our drainage ditches were flowing like rivers.
I have no idea how this fits into the entanglement of the quantum mechanics of our physical world, but I do know that this quick melt significantly increased the level of mud in the paddocks. At the same time, I cannot describe how I occasionally get a sense of someone in Nepal practicing an endless recitation of the mantra “om mani padme hum” as I breathe our air and take meandering steps half a planet away.
The horses were giving me the impression of being spectacularly patient about the slow melt we’ve been having this spring while they were also slipping into behaviors of being annoyingly impatient about getting served pans of feed after I showed up. The impatience is easily soothed by the arrival of their food and the quartet of munching sounds conveys a new meditative peacefulness that I gladly absorb.
It is April and there is a reason to think we might be gardening soon. Does this image look like our garden is eager to get going?:
I’m trying to absorb some of the horses’ patience about the uneven transition from the snow season to our growing season.
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Unknown Connections
There is so much music that I feel connected to, a lifetime’s worth, really. More to the point, the songwriters and performing artists. They have shared their creative visions and I have absorbed their renditions, on repeating rotations for years and often decades. Some of the people whose work has resonated for me draw me to want to know more about them.
I am an unabashed fan.
Their music is the most listened to in my library. They become connected to me in the unique way of celebrity, in that they have no idea who I am, but to me, it is as if we have become friends.
Upon fantasizing about how things would go if we suddenly found ourselves hanging out together with no agenda or time constraints, I wonder, would the artists of my liking honestly show any sense of connection with me?
My cat seems to like me in a way that hints at a connection. She also will just as quickly demonstrate total disdain. I guess, in reality, that combination of feelings is mutual.
That creative artist who penned lyrics that trip my trigger of perspectives, curiosities, emotions, longings, or visions of the world probably also chews food with their mouth open or has some other odd characteristic that would sour my attraction.
I could get all stalker-like and make my fanaticism known to them to find out for sure, but it makes much more sense to me that I leave the connection unknown, other than my anonymous contribution to their financial success by buying what they are selling and listening to the product of their genius.
The secret to connecting with an artist, in my opinion, is by not knowing anything about them when you meet. If a connection clicks, it isn’t a result of the preconceived perception one would have in mind. I have been curious to know how celebrities feel about meeting people who have no idea about their fame.
I would guess for really famous people, it would be refreshing.
In this scenario, I hope I wouldn’t end up dissing the person like the way my cat disses me.
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Wandering Ponders
There are times when putting on music that inspires my personal tastes, music which soars to the greatest depths of my vibrational energy and reaches the core of my being, brings on a rush like a drug.
I love that.
I have come to understand the belief that we make our own luck. Both good and bad. I also believe there are powers beyond our knowing that seek to cheer us on and want the best for us. I believe this more than I think there are powers that work against us.
There are enough circumstances, and our own shortsightedness, to balance that scale against our ultimate success.
I am dismayed over a sensation about the human race too often falling victim to the selfish greed and power worship of our nature. Despite the incredible number of people striving to do good for others, seeking true justice, full equality, better futures, a greater understanding of complex thought exercises that could lead to problem-solving advances, it too often appears as productive as pissing into the wind.
Even if one were to hold the key to fixing some current calamity, it would run smack dab into a wall of resistance and litigation to squash the solution in its infancy.
We have met the enemy. It is us.
By Ruth Bader Ginsberg achieving all that she did, we know what is possible. She didn’t do so invisibly. Obviously, she climbed to new heights on the shoulders of impressive women who came before her. It stands to reason to expect there are others currently striving to build on her legacy.
They are toiling this very minute. May they waste nary a second to launch together in pairs, in study groups, by the dozens, hundreds even, rising up to be heard, to grab positions of power, to lead in ways that would make The Notorious RBG vibrate with glee.
Something is tragically wrong when the police in a democracy get permission to barge into a home in the middle of the night without warning, triggering a defensive response that allows them to use deadly force with abandon and when citizens protest our objections, the perpetrators are held at fault only for the bullets that went astray of the innocent resident in her bed.
So many brilliant people have expressed the dysfunction of allowing corporations to call the shots. It is obvious that excessive salaries for top executives combined with insufficient pay for most everyone beneath them is an untenable situation.
Seems too obvious to deny or defend. As does doing harm to the environment. As does killing others for religious or ideological reasons.
It was said, “Never again.”
I wish.
I love when the good side triumphs. I can’t wait until we all can read about women who have achieved twice what RBG did.
I hope none of them delay for one day their rightful claims to places in history.
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Coping Skills
It’s getting hard to miss the memes questioning what the deal is with 2020 so far. There is one showing the frame for a couple of swings installed next to a brick wall. Yeah, it kinda feels like that. I guess with a global pandemic for a backdrop, any other situation which arises can feel like a slap in the face. The clear video of a white police officer slowly and arrogantly suffocating a black man was a serious gut punch with reverberations riling up centuries of prejudicial inequalities.
It’s getting hard to cope.
I am not surprised to have read somewhere of a trend toward moving from inner cities to the suburbs. I am truly grateful and totally aware of the precious benefit we enjoy in having acres of green space where we can stroll to breathe in the calming balm of all that nature offers.
There was a hint of a break in the cloud cover yesterday that teased of blue sky on the way but in classic 2020 fashion, it disappointed. The sunlight never broke through a gauze of dirty white that mysteriously found a way to hang around.
Our endurance is being tested. I see it as a challenge to how we frame our perceptions. There is no beginning or end when it comes to the span of time. There won’t be a single day which can be measured as the end of the coronavirus pandemic, just as there isn’t an identifiable moment when it began. Same thing for racial prejudice.
We are on a continuum. Life is a big, long ride. Figure out a way to cope for the long haul.
I suggest we mind our manners, take care of ourselves first before helping others, but by all means, seek to help others. Maybe release our urge to so vehemently control outcomes and discover a deeper awareness of what unconscious fears are actually coloring our perceptions.
Put a little extra effort into loving ourselves and in turn, nurturing greater love for others and the world we all share.
What a lovely way to cope with the challenges of life: coping by loving.
Group hug! [after the pandemic, I mean.]
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Relative Something 