often wrong
On my walk today, I was thinking about how much my life will require more confidence and creativity now, more than in the recent past at least. I was thinking about how limits on my time, increased procedural and resource burdens and my own confusion are weighing down on me more just as my discipline and drive to express myself increase.
Then I saw this rock on some kid’s drawing. It was raining. It was easy as pulling it out from under the rock. I hope.
I’ve troubled myself a great deal recently wondering whether or not I’ve missed opportunities that could of made my financial situation better. I think about the professional ambition that I avoided thinking that it was either dishonest or too prideful, or at least something other than the love of good work.
I found this sign while fretting. No doubt it fell off of a sofa or exercise machine while someone was hauling it off the curb, but out of context it was a great find. I realized that I have worked hard to get what’s most important to me to be ready for what’s free to me now. It’s hard to remember that because it’s all around me every day. I’ve got a great wife and great children, and that wasn’t even remotely possible to me in the past.
(No pictures this time. My camera is dying and I can’t afford a new one just yet, besides, it’s just a paperclip. Imagine it.)
On my walk, I was being overly concerned about money. About a block a way, I saw something shiny in the gutter, something certainly metal. I’ve found jewelry plenty of times before and this seemed a possibility.
A paperclip holds paper together by being bent, and clinging to a bent shape. Its grip is relatively loose, and temporary. A staple holds by piercing. I will think about staples.
I was remembering a time when I meditated a lot, sometimes for most of the day for days in a row. I saw this several blocks later after my mind had already drifted away.
What I had remembered most was that, near the end of my practice of meditation, I had read something about a form of walking meditation. I think what I do is the opposite of that now.
Some cards serve only to show the name of the game.
I’ve been listening for more than I’ve been listening to lately. In most of my life so far, these groups are greatly overlapped, so these times are easily passed. I try listen for a voice and it starts to speak. I listen to a beat and I can make my own music.
Now, I’m getting a long silence. There are noises that drop into the background, quickly uncomprehended and then quickly forgotten, but mostly, there’s silence.
I’ve been listening for answers and missing the music I pass. I’ve heard the clean noise and left it unlistened to.
I’ve been overly anxious about many things for about a week. My life has growing concerns. This morning my walk was nearly ruined by heavily-rutted thinking about things about which I could do nothing.
Once I saw the tweezers, all the problems seemed like slivers. Of concern, but so small and barely dangerous and, most of all, better dealt with by finer thinking.
When I was studying quantum physics, I remember hearing that there was a way of seeing the world as a web of incommensurable wavelengths and that all material is composed of the unique co-incidences of these wavelength. Each thing was composed of infinite waves coming together once in one place.
I can’t recall any reason to believe that this was true, or a particularly useful model for the problems at hand (as well as I could understand them). What I remember most was just imagining that it was true and meaningful. It’s still useful for that purpose.
So many otherwise unrelated things influence each little thing in life. Each incident is confluence. To act with intent is to understand that these strands of influence can’t be unraveled or even traced. To appreciate beauty is to embrace this shortcoming.
I’ve annoyed people by repeating the statement ‘You’ve got to destroy in order to create.’ The number is probably higher than the number who have annoyed me with it. It’s not just that it’s a platitude, but one that seems to excuse way too much. Probably most importantly, in most cases of creation those things that are left behind after destruction, and left behind by the grand, justifying creation, carry with them the greatest invitation.
A bridge is destroyed in being replaced. The tangle of remaining rebar waits to be shipped off to be further destroyed, reshaped and reused for other productions utterly unintended and possibly yet unimagined.
I remember doing an experiment in college that demonstrated that light behaved as if it were composed of particles. Then we demonstrated that, no, it’s actually composed of waves without a medium. Of course, it’s not that simply confusing. Nonetheless, it was a great provocative experience.
When I see something that appears as a symbol of something, a face in the pattern on the ceiling, a cloud shaped like a ship, a glove waving hello from the gutter, I consider it to be what it symbolizes and that completely, at least for a moment. As far as I can tell, I find what I am looking for by imagining what I am looking at.