I should be at Costco picking up a few odds and ends followed by a trip to Trader Joe’s.
Plans were made and steps were taken to cross things off of the long list of things that must be done, but life doesn’t always cooperate with us now does it.
I spent part of the morning vacuuming and cleaning around the house but the entire time I was lost in thought about Deep Water Horizon.
Not so much the movie, but thoughts about how many man hours were involved in building a boat that is anchored 5,200 miles above the ocean floor.
How much science, how much engineering and how much faith in people was placed to make it move from theory into reality.
Learn To Walk Before You Run
Are we really smarter than ancient man or are we just lucky to have been born during a time or age when we can benefit from the things they learned.
If Leonardo da Vinci were born today would he be just another man or would he take what exists now and use it to make something we have never seen.
How much happens because of being lucky enough to be born in the right place, time and or family.
And how much doesn’t for the opposite.
They say you have to learn to walk before you can learn to run but I don’t think things always work out that way.
Sometimes we step onto a fast moving treadmill and have to start running immediately and it is not always because we wanted to.
It happens upon occasion because we couldn’t see or didn’t recognize just how much was going on and so we have to adjust on the fly.
These are some of the questions I ponder and wonder about.
Add language to it as well because I wonder what impact language has upon us and how communication affects our interactions with others.
What You Don’t Say Is Still Heard
People respond to what they think we said and to what they hope we said.
Sometimes we answer questions that weren’t asked and wonder if there is any significance or meaning there we should have been aware of.
Were we too busy updating Facebook to show off the beautiful life we want others to think we have to recognize otherwise.
And then I get lost thinking about language again and how some people can write so beautifully in more than one.
I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to me.The Queen- Pablo Neruda
Sometimes I think the real reason I’ll bear down and learn how to speak a language like Spanish is so that I can gain a true understanding of how a poem like the one above reads in the author’s native tongue.
Will I read it and be even more impressed with his/her ability to weave such imagery in more than language?
I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll read it in Spanish and think about how much is lost in the English translation.
The Glasses We Wear
When I leave this seat and make my way to Costco I’ll buy some reading glasses.
I have a few that I use now and then but I am beginning to make more mistakes typing on my phone and not all can be blamed upon fumble fingers.
Some are simply the product of not being able to see as clearly as I once did because aging eyes work differently.
Makes me think of Neruda’s poem and wonder what I’d read if it was in Spanish.
Would I hear about a woman he thought was beautiful regardless of whether she wore a simple shmata or a gown.
Or did he have a different thought or idea he was trying to convey.
If you told your significant other you knew there were taller, smarter and better looking people out there would they be upset if you finished by naming them king or queen.
Would it make a difference if you had known them for a day, 13 years or 30.
Technically that is a rhetorical question but unlike here I’ll answer it.
There are people you click with who understand you better than others.
You don’t have to know those people for long to know they hear what you say when you don’t speak better than those who hear your words spoken.
I suspect sometimes the people you click with maintain their distance is because there is a vulnerability that comes with that sort of thing but that is a different post altogether now isn’t it.
This quote and the one about information not being knowledge are zooming back and forth inside my head.
Got me thinking about how they play in my life and how they play in life in general.
The frustration of physical changes that come with age hasn’t disappeared and in some ways grows stronger.
Yet the appreciation for being forced to look at things differently and to apply information in a different way is significant.
Makes me think I might be becoming more powerful than I ever could have imagined.
Maybe real flight is about to come calling, guess I’ll find out soon enough if I used Icarus proof glue this time.
Life is nothing but interesting, especially when you can hear what isn’t spoken.
