I said this to Nic tonight in reference to him checking what people on eBird have reported seeing at a local park where we’re planning to do some birding.
The full question I posed was:
Remember surprises, before the internet?
It’s nice to be able to research things in advance, but I feel we’re losing something by constantly doing that and stripping away all surprise and mystery from…everything. Little things, big things, medium-sized things. Just look it up! No need to imagine, or wonder, just look it up, be as efficient as possible and leave nothing to chance.
I might be turning into a cranky old man, but really, I think I’m just kind of fed up with the way the world is. We’re losing our humanity in ways that we may never recover. But maybe we’re destined to be giant throbbing brains, anyway. How many quatloos would you bet on that?
Trees don’t make you feel anxious or full of existential dread.
I mean, unless it’s stormy and one looks like it’s going to fall on you, which has admittedly happened to me.
But in general, trees don’t do that and I like that about them.
THIS POST IS COMPLETELY UNRELATED TO CURRENT WORLD EVENTS1Haha, naw. It’s totally related to it. But I am actually doing fine, here with my trees and nature and such..
I saw this, uncredited, on Mastodon. On the one hand, it’s kind of trite. On the other, I like the actual colour and composition of the photograph and agree with the sentiment. It seems so much of our world is built around competition and while competition is not bad in itself, it perhaps shapes too much of what we do in our society, and encourages a kind of selfishness that isolates us from each other.
I don’t actually have a follow-up on this, it just felt like a catchy thing to say.
But if I was trying to boil it down into something meaningful, it would be something like this: If you really believed in something and it turned out to not just be wrong, but very wrong, don’t beat yourself up over it, just acknowledge it, learn from it, and move on.
It’s kind of fortune cookie wisdom, but it’s mid-week and my watch told me I’d have a harder time thinking today, so that’s what you get.
But also this artsy black and white photo of my feet next to a pipe by the river edge as a bonus:
That means everyone in Discord is sharing YouTube clips that look like this to me:
It’s okay, though, the Olympics (in Paris right now as I type this) are yet another major cultural thing I just don’t have interest in any longer. It’s weird, because I don’t know why this changed. I used to watch and even get excited in anticipation of the Oscar broadcast. Now I often struggle to remember the last film to win Best Picture (I do remember this time–it was Oppenheimer, which, like most movies, I haven’t seen. The last movie I watched in a theatre was Pixar’s perfectly fine Onward, in March 2020). In fact, the full list of things that once engaged me that no longer does is both extensive and maybe a little unnerving, because I really don’t know what has changed.
The drop-off in reading has actually kind of disappointed me. It turns out a long commute was really important to enforcing a good reading habit.
On the plus side, I have spent more time doing other things that are engaging or even healthy, like running and drawing. I guess it all balances out.
Sometimes I get a jolt of self-awareness, except it’s not really a jolt, it’s more something that gently pops to the fore of my thinking and I ponder it for a moment.
For example, yesterday after finishing my shortened run, I was walking along the top of the Cariboo Dam, which has railings on both sides and is fairly narrow, except for an expanded middle section where one can stand and look for herons. As I began walking across, I noticed a jogger coming down the path from the entrance to the park. The jogger might go straight and head counter-clockwise down the lake trail, or they might hook left, cross the dam and go clockwise instead. I wasn’t sure, but I figured I’d play it safe and paused in the enlarged area midway across the dam, so the runner could easily pass.
The runner did indeed ascend the stairs and ran across the top of the dam. Once she passed, I resumed my walk out of the park.
A simple thing, but it required me to observe what was happening and then change what I was doing for a few moments, to make things a little easier for someone else, in this case a person I did not know and would likely never see again. Am I patting myself metaphorically on the back for being a nice person?
Yes.
Am I doing it to puff up my own ego? No.
I point it out because this thought process occurs automatically to me. Did I inherit it from my parents? To a degree, I’d say yes. They were both kind and thoughtful people who helped others, so I am, in a way, carrying that forward.
But I also think this is how I’m wired. While there are people out there who might clear the way for the jogger, I wonder how many would see the jogger and calculate the possible results and, in a way, pre-accommodate her by moving out of the way before it was known if it would even be needed? Kind of like being pre-nice. Not many is my hunch, but it is just a hunch.
I wish more people could look at situations like this and react the same way I did. I’m an imperfect mess, but I try to pay attention and I always try to be kind to others. And as the last few days have underscored to me, there are people out there that calculatedly do the opposite, who seem to enjoy architecting misery in others in order to preserve what they’ve got. It makes me sad. It makes me a little angry, too, but mostly just sad.
