Glass Half Full / Half Empty
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Happiness, or love, is in the eye of the beholder, whatever the adage. Perspective is everything. But we tend toward bifurcation in the ways we think. We have lefts and rights, ups and downs, high roads and low roads, good and bad, devastation and restoration. Yet, those polarities describe the extremes. Extremes are rarer than middles, in reality.
We are mixes of traits and characteristics. We are spectrum dwellers. We are park rangers on a landscape of continua—subtly, granularly, evolutionarily recapitulating eons of shifts in the surround.
We are always toggling in our perspective. Someone close to us dies young and we reflect on the bigger existential issues: Are we living a good life, are we developing our best selves? Serving the good of all? And then an hour later, we are thinking about what luncheon to serve our guests who will arrive hungry in two hours, and whether there is time enough to shop for the food, prepare the lunch and do a load or two of laundry. We read a newspaper article about Sudanese refugees who have arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire with barely any clothing let alone plans for a future. And our hearts go out to them, perhaps a donation. And then we are thinking about losing weight, about paperwork piled on the desk that needs going through. Toggle, toggle. Microscopic; telescopic; ever changing lenses.
Everything moves, gyrates, rumbles, ribs, redistributes, fills and empties. Our glass overflows and then we sip from it or share it around. It sits on the counter, refills, empties out completely when tipped upside down, only a few drops remaining on its interior walls.
This filling, this emptying, this beauteous dance captivates and vitalizes. Our very cells recognize the flux, the process, how this process has sameness and yet, also, the marvel of nothing exactly reiterative—more an endless set of echoes than restatements.
‘Happy’ is familiar spiced with nuance, or novel mellowed by the known. Both and. Both and.
Guest saddle: What did you behold with awe today, or marvel, or even a speck of curiosity? What enlivened your eyes, your ears, or quickened your heart beat? What did you forget to notice, or pass by in a fog? What awaits your happy attention or atunement?
Web Camel 