THANK GOD I’M NOT ANY OF THOSE!
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Winter’s Here!
December 15, 2009 – 9:04 am
Whether you look like this:
… or this:
… it’s great when winter finally arrives, for good, and we’ve got the house weatherproofed and the oil in the snowblower changed and the summer clothes swapped out in the front-hall closet, and you can get outside and start enjoying yourself!
Had a close-to-epic day skiing on Sunday, and used the opportunity to skip watching my favorite NFL get trounced, at the same time. All that, after spending Saturday night ushering at the local (and locally cherished) annual performance of Handel’s Messiah.
Say what you will– that shoveling snow gets harder each year, that the bumps on Aspen Mountain get bigger and tighter, or that the news seems even less pleasant than last year (as always)– it’s hard not to really appreciate how much fun wintertime can be, once you’ve gotten re-acclimated.
Even if your best friend just wants to spend the day indoors.
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On Disappointment
August 20, 2009 – 9:41 am
I was going to write about disappointments, and how we deal with them. This was specifically brought on by a series of unfortunate things that seemed to be besieging one of the kids.
But then, a curious thing happened:
I procrastinated. Put off posting anything.
And surprise! A week later, all the stuff she’d been crying about now seems like “old news.” Not that the disappointment/worry/sadness has completely evaporated, but that the demands of today make all those things recede into the background a bit. Cuz new stuff is always popping up. Good and bad stuff.
So sometimes, the best solution is to do nothing…
Just keep living.
What we don’t want, then, is constant sadness in our faces. And it’d be nice if we didn’t have the cosmic background radiation equivalent of bad news/worries, either. But maybe all that background “noise” is just part of being alive, and being connected.
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Here’s Another Literary Guy With Something To Say.
August 6, 2009 – 10:30 am
Got a comment from “Zashkaser” recently, to the effect that sometimes we simply don’t wind up fulfilling our destiny.
Also mentioned that she could appreciate the distinction between “fate” and “destiny.”
Which, for some reason, led me to think of yet another literary fellow. This time: Kurt Vonnegut.
You could view him as proclaiming the pointlessness of existence, or you could see him as simply acknowledging that we humans are– just possibly– just not that important. To our apparently perpetual chagrin. Not that what we do– or don’t do– with our lives doesn’t matter. But, in the “grand scheme of things,” it’s really not all that critical. (Which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t attempt to do anything. It’s just that the Universe will probably not collapse if you– personally– forget to put out the trash tomorrow morning.)
One of my favorite insights of his was:
Look at it this way: 500 years ago, the smartest men on the planet didn’t know that the other half of the planet even existed. And the people in that second half hadn’t even gotten around to inventing the wheel… And we have the gall to call ourselves “homo sapiens”?
(Sort of like: Were the Fabulous Thunderbirds fabulous, right from the get-go?)
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