Petdad

When we first moved into our current house our ears were filled with continuous child’s play out on our small cup-de-sac. There were many families living on the street who were still building full total family unit. Due to expectant mothers, there were sometimes moves resulting from ‘out-growing’ the current house size. There were some moves resulting from long-time aging empty nest-ors who needed a location for greater level of care.

Slowly, the children grew up, as they do. We watched as they graduated, moved off, got married, and began a family of their own. The soundtrack of neighborhood children playing on the street became softer, and eventually dwindled, to no sound of children playing on the street.

Over time families split and moved away, some grew ill and passed-on, and everyone got older, as they do.

While watching television early evening yesterday there was a sudden burst of yelling kids out on the street. The sound was of a bunch of boys, yelling from excitement to one another and just having fun doing ‘everything’ kids do out on the street. I looked out the window and saw about 10 or so boys running around, some were on bikes, there were a couple of razors being ridden, football being tossed, and a couple of baseball bats being swung. There was nothing coordinated out there, they were simply enjoying the moment seemingly without a care in the world.

They were loud, and it was wonderful.

After our move to this house I didn’t think in long-term fashion, how things would change over time. We were young and everything was different. Things have changed, and we have experienced seemingly everything during this life phase. I’m going to take the new street-playing children sounds as that of a ‘clock-reset’.

Yes, perhaps the reset idea will help me, help us remember and feel the youthful energy of life after the move.

To experience occurrences in one’s daily life is, well, daily life. Things happen. Happenstance is either externally projected or internally manifested.

We often understand daily occurrences as pattern, or an irregular event. Most often, day-in, day-out events simply occur without us even providing much thought. It just ‘is’, they just ‘are.

Is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been, has, have, had, do, does, did, shall, will, should, would, must, might, may, can, and could.

This post began with a completely different purpose, one that I will continue eventually, soon, later, now, another time, tomorrow, next week, or?

I know now that I’ll be fixated on trying to remember the xxx something that was there in my brain all along. Well I found it this morning. Tucked away neatly within the folds and crevices of grey matter, there it was. All I did was allow the thought to simmer for 24 hours and just like that it was found.

Fascinating to think.

A good friend of mine recently spoke the title of this post. Only his intention was not for the purpose of me writing about it. Or maybe it was. It sure got me thinking though, a lot.

I have an ‘expiration date’. We all have an expiration date and we don’t even know when that will come to pass. Nor would we want to know.

My sister, who lost her 27 year old son to pneumonia just a few short years ago, talked about this with me just the other day. We talked about it because I asked. I am close with my older sister Kath, we have always had a special bond. She will still sometimes introduce me as her ‘baby brother’ and it makes me smile. She had great responsibility of the other two siblings in our family including our brother Gib, also older than me, and myself. Gib was more independent however and it was me who needed all the ‘mothering’.

I told Kath that a day doesn’t go by without me thinking about her son Sean, and how I hurt for her. And I asked her the hard question out of loving concern ‘How do you even process that?’ ‘That’, being Sean’s death. I’ve never had this discussion with her because I knew it would be emotional on both ends, and it was. But it was necessary, and it was good, and it was perfect.

During my phone conversation with Kath, I told her about those words my friend spoke last Friday. He spoke them out of love, determination, courage, and strength. He spoke them in front of everyone at his wife’s eulogy, and it was perfect.

I only have so many words and I’m trying to make them all count.

There is something going on right now and it is either completely new and exciting, or not new and dreadfully boring. Maybe it’s both. There is something going on right now and it may be unsettling, as a lot of every day life can be. I wonder if the feeling of unsettlement is felt by all? At least many? Hopefully some. I know that peripheral reverb is felt among many, and it’s not good.

Things are the same, but they are different. Unfortunately I have experienced many forms of unsettlement in my lifetime. How naive was I to think, well into adulthood, that my entire life would be without blemish?!

9/11

March 13, 2020

January 6, 2021

Unsettlement. Perhaps that topic alone should be an offered course within a higher education Psychology program.

Life these days is not unique, it’s just different. We have new and unknown variables within the equation that we never before experienced. New variables are unpredictable and often they create ‘chaos’, even at the most micro level. So what do we do with these new equations? We try one solution. And when that solution doesn’t work, we modify our efforts and try again. It’s the only way we learn how to solve, or at least thwart, our current challenges.

Whatever ‘it’ is I am unsettled by, will not be punctuated by fear.

Just posted under the Sky tab is one of the many photos I took yesterday of Sky. I am enamored by Sky and this time of the year produces many visual gems to enjoy. Whether it be Sky or other joys of life, there’s only one of those gems in any given moment of time. My goal is to seek them all out.

Watching a television interview yesterday the interviewee said at one point ‘ …to honor the honorable’. Powerful statement that was, and I became even more captivated in what I was watching. Already interested in the interview, the statement got me thinking about so much in my life, and it created an unshakable impact.

Here is not the place to go on about who I honor and for what reasons because it’s not about me, and I am going to leave it at that. You can fill in your own blank and think of it as one of those ‘food for thought’ ideas that simply gets one to think which is something we as a society need to do more often.

We dream. All the time we dream. Daytime dreams have been coined as ‘Day Dreaming’, which in essence is recognizing creative imagination in the conscious state. If one recalls dreams as do I, a parallel world to the conscious state is recreated within a sleep state. It’s really wild as I can most all the time remember my dreams on a nightly basis.

An article on sleep in Healthline describes the following: Hypnagogia is the transitional state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep. It’s the opposite of hypnopompia, which is the transitional state that occurs before you wake up.

Then there is a sleep state termed as hypnagogic hallucinations. This is when dreams are really crazy and sometimes upsetting. The research is like any other research can be… a cable-knit sweater that just goes on and on.

There have been times when after waking up I realize all that just happened was ‘only a dream’. Depends on the manifested dream whether I’m rather disappointed, glad, or just indifferent. I love to dream, I am a dreamer in both my sleep and conscious state. The ‘positive’, whatever it may be, is always a possibility. Always. Dreams are just as real to me as when I am in my conscious awake state. They’re fascinating. They spark individual creativity and often find solutions to ‘real-life’ issues. They are exciting.

Life in my dreams is real, but then again how do I really know that my ‘conscious state’ is any more real than a dream itself?

As I played the piano this morning I was thinking about my life, present and past. Generally in the morning I make a point to not think about anything other than sheet music and my proficiency level to play it well. Thinking can be a show-stopper at times because I begin to ‘play the tape’ and then dig deeper into the memory.

We’ve all heard the phrases: ‘Once in a lifetime opportunity’, ‘Chance of a lifetime opportunity’, and surely more. Phrases as such are positioned so that those who listen can waste no time in making that purchase, signing up, committing to, share the opportunity with family, friends, and sometimes even neighbors.

Digging deeper in thought connected me to ones daily experiences and how these experiences help to shape a person for who they are or rather who they have become. Experiences may add-to, or take-away from the person, the being. And often these experiences truly only do occur once in a lifetime.

Experiences = Lessons

They are not random, even if it seems otherwise.

Each day, every day is a lesson. A lesson of a lifetime. We may experience a similar lesson on a different day, but that particular lesson involves every single variable that surrounds it. Never are the variables ever the same and there is always something to learn through these lessons of a lifetime.

I wrote a piece some time ago titled Your House is Like a Museum. Apparently the internet bots like that one because it gets multiple views almost every single day. Once it was even ‘viewed’ well over 100 times in one day. Whole I thought the subject matter and content was worth writing about, I really didn’t think that post would have the greatest number of views over any other Post or Page. So here’s what I did… I Copied and Pasted the title of that piece and changed ‘Your’ into ‘My’ for this post.

If it was the title’s algorithm which attracted the bot, then this Post on the Home page will receive daily views as well. In doing so, I noticed something. I should have initially written the lowercase ‘l’ as uppercase ‘L’, since the word Like is part of the title. But I did not.

So here’s where the unsolved mystery will possibly not replicate. In creating this post, I did make the change and ‘Like’ is now written with an uppercase ‘L’. I also changed the word ‘Your’ in the original piece to ‘My’ for this post. One last change, I fixed the word found in the title of the original essay. It too is now written with an uppercase ‘L’.

While it doesn’t seem like I did much to the piece’s title, I did change three variables. I’m sure once I ‘publish’ this post the internet bots will be in a digital tizzy not knowing what to do. Something, actually three something’s with the bot comfort object has changed.

One of two things will occur. I this website may increase its page viewings due to the replicated title, or both site locations Musings tab and Home page will no longer see habitual visits from the bots. Who knows? All this may start a bot feeding frenzy, or I may have just removed that algorithm plate for good.

Go somewhere else internet bots. I think we’d all be happier if, in your own digital species replication, you just cancelled one another out.

Zero.

Time between Christmas and New Years is always so quiet, at least for me. Presents have been opened, decorative lights slowly trickle off for another year, local roadways have fewer cars, and televised news is rather ‘light’ and generic. There’s just not a whole lot going on. It’s like the stillness after a big storm where only remnants left in its wake remain.

I’m sure for many, if not most, this is not a similar scenario especially for those with dependants living at or away from home. We’re not waiting for any flights, not expecting any company, and we’re not going anywhere of note. I can however hear the dogs breathing as they sleep, and the wall clock as it signals the seconds gone by.