My Own Personal Clouds

I stepped out on the deck at 4:00 AM, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Perseid Meteor shower..

Not only did I set myself up by being just this side of late (the best viewing time was supposed to be between 2:00 and 4:00 AM; come on, I'm dedicated to nature, but probably not THAT dedicated), but the Universe seemed to oblige in obscuring my chances with a bright full moon, and a misty cloud cover.

I laughed at myself out there alone in my pajamas, listening to the August crickets. But it was cool, and rather nice. So I took myself out the front door instead of the back, eliminating some of the benevolent moon glare and peered hopefully upwards.

Clouds.

But then as I waited for the briefest of moments, I noticed stars in the spaces between the clouds. As I looked skyward, more appeared.

Actually, that was not true. They didn't appear. They were there all the time. It was only my personal cloud cover that obscured the fact that they were riding up there, steadfast, not bothered one whit by my lack of vision.

Metaphors and analogies abounded. My mind whirled with the vast implications. Then I stepped on an acorn in bare feet and my poetic thoughts turned to something else. It figures, I thought. That's what I get for philosophy before dawn.

But then, as I turned to go back inside with my sore foot, a bright meteor shot just off the corner of my eyesight. After all, that is where magic happens...

I got the joke. Personal clouds or not, stars, meteors and wonder ride just on the other side of my own bias and misty concerns. And once in a while, one pierces through with laughter just to keep us reminded.

The Art of the Expectation

So, we all have them. Expectations. Some of them make sense to other people, but in the final analysis, they probably are mostly fiction dreamed up by ourselves.

We wake up every morning with the expectation (well, at least I do) that today will be a day pretty much like the last one. Why is that? I admit that the old "sun coming up" (which it doesn't) like "clockwork" (which we invented) tends to give us a false sense of normalcy. Just watch what would happen if the sun gave it a miss one morning and skipped a day.

Ok, and the stars. Yeah, those are fixed in place, and none of the close ones seem to be approaching super nova--and if they did, it would be old news, as most of them are pretty far away. Light years, to be exact. So they don't seem to be ready to go poof anytime soon in the distant past.

Maybe this is why we expect our friends, family and people at large to do things a certain way. We get snarky when technology doesn't perform up to our expectations, when our coffee isn't hot enough, when the counter girl isn't friendly enough, when our car blatantly refuses to start. We expect the world to operate the way we want it to, and take it personally when it doesn't.

We expect our government to operate a certain way, and I bet you don't think it's operating the way you expect it to. Trouble is, most of us have a pretty individual expectation of a system made up of a lot of complexity.

I think the bigger something is, the less nimble it can be. It takes a lot longer to turn or stop something when it becomes gargantuan. Since 1910, we've gone from 92 million people to 308 million in 2010 in the United States. That's not counting the people who refused to do their census, and there are a fair number of them.

That's a lot of bodies. It's also a lot of expectations. And we have a pseudo-representative government. How could we expect it to be anything but unwieldy? Think about how complicated things got with the last five person committee you worked with, served on or had to tolerate.

And then throw instantaneous information into the mix. How often is your first knee jerk reaction the right answer? Now multiply that by 308 million people.

Yikes.

Suddenly, I think it's optimistic to expect anything to work well. So it's a gift that my tea is hot this morning, the sun looks like it's coming up despite us, and there aren't any prehistoric supernovas finally arriving on the horizon.

I expect it to be a decent day.