I don’t know what that is, but I wish I hadn’t touched it

Curiosity has a funny way of rewarding action sometimes. Normally people only mention the highlights of curiosity – the exploration, the quirky discoveries, the interesting facts gleaned from odd experiences and strange people met along the way.

What doesn’t get mentioned so much is how hard it can be to live with. One gets bored with an otherwise perfectly acceptable life if there is not at least a trickle of curiosity-worthy material. Being bored with one's life is a slow poison. It is an ally of depression and they are both distant cousins (in my case) to eating binges. Ah, potatoes.

But I digress.

The main difficulty I find in this yearning to know about things, is that although it is easy enough to find out, it is then very very hard to keep quiet about the picture eventually drawn by all these points of data. Generally other people are not interested or they would have already googled it for themselves. Take as an example the methane plumes in the Arctic that are in the news this month. That sounds interesting doesn't it? Sounds also a bit like bad news too - isn't methane a greenhouse gas? Yup, twenty times more so than carbon dioxide. Oh shitbags. What will that mean for sea levels and polar bears and weather weirding??  Well probably a lot but no-one has a guaranteed divination method for anything other than "maybe this, maybe that" (all of which are sobering enough). Still, at last we're having the conversation.

Oh no. Wait. We're not are we?
New Zealand might be.

Maybe it is because we live so far away. If we lived closer we would care.

Oh wait, the Earth is a globe, all that water up the top is connected to all our water down below....

See what happens? One question leads to another. And thence to another and so on until my mind if full and I spin out of my chair and trip over my feet falling into fevered-dream sleep. Perhaps I exaggerate that loop a little for narrative tension, but you get my point.

Lots of data. Lots of consequences. Not a lot of ideas about what to do with this knowledge or (one step further) what to do in response (well actually the established ideas all involve individuals using and consuming less, and no-one wants to be the first to blink). Instead our news is filled with predicable politically flavoured blandals (like scandals only really really bland) and circus gossip.

This isn't the first topic this little pattern has repeated itself on either.  You'd think I would resist the urge to scratch the curiosity itch. I've tried. It doesn't work.

Curiosity killed the cat but a life unqueried is unlivable.



 

Wilbur's worries

Today I chipped in $25 USD towards Patricia in the Philippines for feed for her pigs.

I don't think too closely about the conditions Patricia's pigs might be kept in, and I know full-well what their early and inevitable end will be, but that's my problem, not hers. She's trying to feed a family and keep body and soul together. The fact that my world view was deeply effected by Charlotte's Web is yet another of my first world affectations and luxuries. Some of the people who loan money through Kiva have complicated and detailed moral guidelines about their loaning philosophy. I just want to help people (it turns out that I favour loaning to women, that wasn't a deliberate thing initially).

Patricia looked tired and a little bit sad in her photo. She was a little bit out of focus and is a bit thin. She really looked like she could do with a hand. Plus pigs, although smart and often interesting companions, really do have stinky stinky poo. If you're choosing to farm pigs, you're automatically and obviously short on options. Really. Nearly anything else is better from a day-to-day operational stink factor.

I was reading someone clever the other day (maybe it was Chris Guillebeau, but if it wasn't, well, he is clever so check him out anyway) who said that when in doubt about the next step to take for your own projects or in your own life, then help somebody and make something.
Help somebody and make something.
Genius.

So good luck Patricia, and somebody is going to get some woolly socks.

Emily Dickinson, "Forever — is composed of Nows —"

Forever – is composed of Nows –


‘Tis not a different time –

Except for Infiniteness –

And Latitude of Home –



From this – experienced Here –

Remove the Dates – to These –

Let Months dissolve in further Months –

And Years – exhale in Years –



Without Debate – or Pause –

Or Celebrated Days –

No different Our Years would be

From Anno Dominies –



- Emily Dickinson, "Forever — is composed of Nows —"

Monday moment

It was dark when the alarm went off, but not cold. I'd been dreaming - those violent images and actions blurring into an ill-edited montage of mayhem and blood. I wasn't glad to hear that alarm and fumbled for the 'reprieve' button. Could I ignore it? No. Monday. Of course. It is starting to feel like it is always Monday.
I make the decisions in this house. Work happens. The rituals of commuting are ingrained and now unquestioned. The reward is a coffee at the desk after log-in and then what? Then we do what is needful until release.
Release. Repeat. Monday again.