Don't Look At The Trees
Want to know the key to skiing successfully through the trees? Don’t look at the trees! Instead, focus on where you want to go between them. If you spend your time focusing on the trees, you’ll end up hitting one. This principle applies to life and marriage as well. If you focus on where you want to go and your role in the process, by default you’ll avoid most of the pitfalls and issues along the way.
The Seasons of Life
In a letter to an acquaintance, Emerson compared the mind to a pear tree that goes through a season of barrenness only to suddenly burst forth in fruitful growth. Emerson learned that to avoid the frustration of barren times, a man needs to “adopt the pace of nature” whose “secret is patience.” Just as the farmer must continue pruning and grafting his trees in the winter in order to reap the harvest in the spring, Emerson continued to work and cultivate his mind to prepare for the return of inspiration. After a mental winter, his mind would inevitably bloom once more.
An Urgent-Paced World
There are the often sighed phrases — “life is fast-paced”, “society these days is so fast-paced”, etc. But “fast” really isn’t descriptive enough. It’s a little generic to define our life with the same adjective we might use to describe a car.
Closer, I think, is “urgent”. That’s what these phrases really seem to be getting at. There is an ever present urgency to our lives, to our society. An urgency to do, see, achieve, or fix that next thing ahead of us. Peel one thing out of the way and the sense of urgency creeps up for the next thing moving up behind it. If something within us isn’t driving the urgency, then it is something or someone outside of us. Yes, we are moving fast, and we’re moving fast because of the sense of urgency compelling us forward. In a sense chasing ourselves off the edge of the cliff.
It makes sense for life to have some degree of urgency. To have moments of urgency. The question is, does life and society need to be defined by it. Or, can we move in and out of urgency more gracefully and deliberately as the situation calls for it, as we call for it, and ultimately walk off the edge of the cliff in peace.
How Microbes Defend and Define Us
Scientists are regularly blown away by the complexity, power, and sheer number of microbes that live in our bodies. “We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are parts of our bodies we know nothing about.”
Baby Moose Playing in Sprinkler
We’re all made of the same stuff.
If you liked that, watch an otter juggle a rock around his paws.
