Guys, like children, often have a reputation for being drawn to shiny things. I suppose you can extend that to some women when it comes to diamonds, though that might just be all those diamond commercials speaking. Anyhow, getting back to business.
The Perseid meteor shower is tonight. Nerdy but totally cool..ish. Shooting stars are such a spectacle, so romanticized as a sort of fleeting beauty; a moment of bright something. They are great. They are also usually smaller than a grain of sand, which is not so impressive. I like the surprise of it, the flash; or maybe I'm drawn to the tragedy of witnessing the cremation of a piece of old sand.
Unfortunately for my need to be dazzled, it's cloudy tonight.
That makes me think. I'm pretty sure that if we never saw them, they'd not be called "shooting stars." They'd probably just be labeled as nothing more than space sand burning up in the sky; out of sight, out of mind.
What I find surprising now that I'm thinking about this stuff is how impressive they are to me, when while I'm looking for them I am ignoring the 2,000 or so stars visible before my eyes. Not only that, but one of those bright dots is actually a galaxy, made up of 400 billion stars. That's insane! And bigger than a grain of space sand. I know these things, but they don't impress me the same way because I don't see them in the same flashy way as I do meteor showers.
This bothers me, because it makes me wonder what else I might be missing by covering up real awe with my fleeting desire to be entertained and dazzled by something relatively insignificant but so very shiny.
"And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith."
-Galations 6: 9-10
Manageable fun-size world
Saturday, August 1, 2009
at
12:14 AM
What would it be like to give in to the best thing ever? The things keeping that best thing at bay would seem a bit crazy once the letting go happened; like why were they there in the first place? The ability to remove really points toward the desire to put into place originally. Why? Lots of things scare our pants off.
There's this thing called cognitive consistency. It's the need to eliminate what we feel doesn't belong in what we recognize, to keep things safe. It's why horror movies cause irrational but emotionally satisfying screams, even in big manly men who grunt and destroy things. We're continually trying to make sense of what's going on around us, and to take control of it in some feeble way to help ourselves deal with the junk. I'd call the control artificial, as we basically convince ourselves of what we want to see regardless of how things really are. There's a lot of blocking out of things undesired, things to be ignored; like closing the doors as you walk through your house until you've got a windowless corner room to function in.
How can you know you're living full unless you've let it all go at one point? Or conversely, how and when do you remind yourself that "hey, I didn't used to be stuck in this room and I'm totally gonna go chill out on the hammock that I'm pretty sure is still in the back yard?"
Our heads are far too small and dense a place to build an adequate world within; less living inside it, more using it to look outside.
There's this thing called cognitive consistency. It's the need to eliminate what we feel doesn't belong in what we recognize, to keep things safe. It's why horror movies cause irrational but emotionally satisfying screams, even in big manly men who grunt and destroy things. We're continually trying to make sense of what's going on around us, and to take control of it in some feeble way to help ourselves deal with the junk. I'd call the control artificial, as we basically convince ourselves of what we want to see regardless of how things really are. There's a lot of blocking out of things undesired, things to be ignored; like closing the doors as you walk through your house until you've got a windowless corner room to function in.
How can you know you're living full unless you've let it all go at one point? Or conversely, how and when do you remind yourself that "hey, I didn't used to be stuck in this room and I'm totally gonna go chill out on the hammock that I'm pretty sure is still in the back yard?"
Our heads are far too small and dense a place to build an adequate world within; less living inside it, more using it to look outside.
Luke 6:27
"But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you."
Here's to knocking that default cognitive consistency off track. And everyone knows fun-sized snacks leave something to be desired.
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