From 2019
Before we left to run errands today, I noticed the snow was sticky. Perfect for snowballs. I told my daughter she better be prepared when we got home. She giggled.
After we got home, and parked the car at the bottom of the solid ice driveway, we brought groceries inside. My daughter’s friend texted her and wanted to get together (online). My daughter told her she would, later.
DAUGHTER: “I will always want to play outside in the snow with you, Mommy, instead of be inside at my computer.”
ME: “Oh my goodness! I feel so lucky!”
And I DO feel VERY lucky about this!
We went outside and had a snowball fight. LOTS of laughter.
Our cat sat on the porch railing and supervised the human shenanigans with barely concealed contempt. My daughter sprinkled tiny clumps of snow in front of him. He made the funniest meow sounds and swiped at the snow. We laughed so hard.
Then my daughter wrote “I Love You” in the snow.
ME: “Awwwww! I love you too. I love that you wrote that there.”
DAUGHTER: “I love you.”
ME: “If a person climbed to the top of the spruce tree they could see that perfectly.”
We laugh.
DAUGHTER: “We will KNOW it’s there.”
ME: “That’s true.”
I hug her.
ME: “Have I mentioned you’re the joy of my life?”
DAUGHTER (grinning): “Only a few hundred times.”
We got the idea to slide down the little hill our house is on. We used shopping bags. The kind that are permanent, have loop handles, and are coated with plastic. I figured out that if you pull the loops up in front of you, there will be a couple inches of the bag in front of you. This pushes the snow in front of you and makes a good packed path. It was perfect. The little shopping bags zoomed down the hill. (A good workout for the abs, sitting in a v shape with feet lifted off the ground.)
It was SO much fun!!! So much laughter (and a bit of screaming). The huge snowbank at the foot of the hill, created by the snowplows, stopped us and kept us safe.
You know what’s a beautiful colour combination? Thick white snow nestled in pale silver blue spruce needles.
We slid down the hill for a long time and finally had to come in because snow had melted through our pants and our legs were getting cold.
Remember how you felt when you were a kid and you’d spent the day outside playing in the snow with the neighbourhood kids? Happy, so happy, all the way through. Turns out you can still feel that way.
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BREATHTAKINGLY SPECIFIC SYNCHRONICITY
From 2021
The Universe works in WILDLY specific ways. Here is what happened to me today. My mind is still blown.
Eighteen years ago I came across an amazing little book about coping with uncertainty, in a university library. “Coping With Uncertainty: Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-Organization, and Complexity,” by Uri Merry.
For the past year I’ve been remembering that book. There is a brilliant analogy in it that helped me understand, for the first time, how chaos can actually be a GOOD thing if you (or nature, or empires, organizations and other systems) deal with it in a constructive way. I’ve been wanting to share that analogy with all my friends.
Several months ago I bought a copy of Merry’s “Coping With Uncertainty.” I searched through it and could not find the analogy. I skimmed through the book THREE TIMES and could NOT find that analogy. Other stuff was going on in life, and I didn’t have time to read the whole book, so I gave up and put it aside.
Last week I started writing something that I hope will help people deal with stress right now. I thought about that analogy again. I got the book out, planning to look for the analogy or read the whole damn book if necessary. It explains things much more clearly than I could. I didn’t get around to looking for the analogy though.
Today a few friends on FB sent around a little “game.” The rules are that you pick up the book that is closest to you and turn to page 45, and type sentence 11 from that page.
I picked up “Coping With Uncertainty” and turned to page 45. And there it was. The analogy.
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