Probability - Poet-try

My life is a probability tree.
My roots fork deep, though slow.
My decisions break the ground for Me
To become more stable as I grow.

Each day are choices to be made.
Each morning to sleep on or to rise.
Each time I draw aside the shade
To greet the challenges of blue skies.

Though true that there may be greyer days.
Though rains may fall outside.
Though sometimes it feels harder to praise
To be at peace and abide.

Trees can take years to mature.
Trees are often quite boring to view.
Trees sometimes even need manure
To allow their soil to refresh and renew.

So let patience be my rhyme & reason.
So may steady progress be my goal & love.
So that my behavior be pruned in due season
To direct my limbs towards heaven above.

I am learning to branch out to new spaces.
I attempt to overcome shyness and malaise.
I admit it is vulnerable and painful in places
To stretch beyond a tendency to laze.

An object at rest tends to remain in that state.
An object in motion does the same.
An object to Newton's laws comes too late
To ever affect the memory of his good name.

Memory - Momentary

In the land of memory, the time is always now.

...

Hang on a second. That is quite inaccurate. It always "was." For in recording something to be remembered, it simply must be in the past tense to become a memory.

The land was populated with has beens, ustacoulds, & never-wases. Over time, their edges became less distinct & more fuzzy. Which made for them to become more comfortable when embraced in reuinon, but difficult to recognize & be certain of which of the above groupings it fit. There were some inhabitants which switched roles, depending on the person they met & the strength of their relationship to them.

There were quiet periods, when there was a lull in visitation traffic. There was a recent shift in popularity in the neighboring realms of the present & the future. The amusement parks of Creativity & Imagination had rides that were routed to pass through the land of Memory. That led to some interest in Memory tangentially. And as the visitors to the park aged, they tended to spend a good portion of time wandering through Memory's lanes & reuniting with old & forgotten friends - reliving past experiences & rehashing old events.

The youth had little interest in Memory's offerings, much preferring to spend their time in the moment, capturing stray moments like the fluttering of butterflies, pinning them to boards, walls, & posts. Then they were packed away & shipped off in boxes to Memory, to be reviewed later. It often took years for these youth to get around to following up on what they had forwarded, some of it lay dormant in Memory's storage for years. Forgotten in the general clutter, & lonely in waiting for the opportunity to be brought out again into the fresh air & used.

Some people were lost to Memory & had no one left to inquire after the matter of their rediscovery. There were others who were never fully recovered, & those who bore witness to what remained of their loved one never fully recovered themselves either. Something more was lost than merely the person, but also the witness of the lost soul who had invested themselves into that person's life & felt the loss of that access to that part they gave away.

Time is said to heal all wounds, but there was no promise that it would dull all pain. Scars have ran deep in the families & friends of those lost souls - in certain environments & times of the year, the hurt is felt more sorely, like a phantom limb. Time offers alternative options & opportunities to spend oneself into other people & projects. But it is not designed to replace the person, but to substitute for every soul is unique & the bonds that have been severed cannot be replicated & spliced into another relationship, however much both parties may try. New bonds must be formed & recognized for their own unique abilities & value.

It is a dangerous business to travel Memory alone, without a destination held firmly in mind. One can never be certain who they shall meet along the way. Encounters may involve the untangling of messy & complicated relationships with other travelers walking the same paths. Some of these may become suspicious or territorial around certain areas, & become aggravated & defensive when questioned as to why they should be so. Often, these people will turn the question around & ask what right the first person should have in being there in the first place. The first person may protest that there was no indication of ownership in the area, upon which the defensive individual may counterpoint that there were signs in the area, if you knew how to read them. But, as not everyone is literate in such things, it may be the second person's elitist behavior becoming exposed as thinking that everyone else thinks like they do. Which, when seen in plain daylight, is frankly embarrassing to all parties involved. Depending on the graciousness of the party, such revelations may be either grounds for apology & forgiveness or enmity & bitterness. Sometimes both take place - even when forgiveness is offered, a bitter heart can perceive this as pity & reject the offer along with the person behind it.

As stated above, traveling alone throughout Memory is dangerous & liabilities are assumed at the traveller's own risk. Discretion truly is the better part of valor, and not all situations are worth the fight given the cost of a victory. Overall, it is the individual's attitude & perspective of such matters which shall dictate whether their time dwelling in Memory is a pleasant experience. Selective travel can lead to better & healthier routes, while confronting some of the problems in troubled areas can lead to encounters which leave the traveller in either cathartic or crippled state.

It is recommended that you be patient during the time spent in Memory. Some parts have fragile ecosystems & will only bloom & ripen into full splendor in their due season. Most things respond better to respect than coercion in providing directions to desired areas & names of personages. Often, a circuitous route is offered, but it is often for good reasons. Shortcuts may be littered with dead-ends, leaving the traveller cut short on their journey. And often, more is learned on the way to the destination than when arriving at the destination itself.

This ends the official overview of the Land of Memory. Please feel free to visit at leisure & stay as long as preferred. The inhabitants will be able to add more details regarding specific activities & opportunities within its borders.

Explanation - Expression

It has reached a point at which I am that peculiar balance of caffeinated and exhausted which causes me to feel inspired in wanting to write something down. This has happened in the past months, but I have talked myself out of it. It is strangely narcissistic on two fronts to do this. On the one hand, I question the importance of my thoughts being framed for others to see - isn't that hubris? On the other, this self-deprecation does no one any good, when my conscience chides me that I really fear mediocrity. That my thoughts are not so profound or worth sharing. (Which may be the case.) Or that I shall not do a good job of communicating to others as to why my interests are interesting to me.

But really, in the end, even if no one reads me but me? I shouldn't mind so much. But I write with an audience in mind. I do better when I am trying to explain something and tailor it to that particular person's feedback. In this way, I gain a better feeling for whether my interest really is interesting and whether it is able to be shared. Because, ultimately, these interests I come across give me such joy and delight that I want to share this feeling with others so that their lives become similarly improved.

Long introduction aside, I shall try to engage in this blog more often. I have said this in the past, and each reason I have stopped is because I hit a proverbial wall in things to talk about. I tend to front load my priorities of things I find interesting, then get tired of writing when I reach less interesting things. Each time, it has gotten to a point where my time would be usually spent experiencing interesting things worth writing about has been replaced by me trying to write about them instead.

Quite simply, I exhaust my content of interesting things and decide it is better to return to the pursuit of seeking out things that interest me, figuring it is better for all involved. If I write something, I wish it was worth the reading.

But this is but an introduction and an explanation as to my absences in the past. As I have tried to do more or less successfully in the past each time. And each time, I learn a little bit more about myself and how I process information. I can be quite self-obsessed, but am not always self-impressed.

Thank you so far for your patience.

To return to the concept of my thinking better out loud to other people, I am rereading Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency." There is a character named Way who is the Steve Jobs of the fictitious WayForward technology brand. One of his peculiar habits is of calling his employees and leaving long messages on their home answering machines. In these messages, it often happens that he hashes out the details of ideas he has for products and services to be offered by his company. So it is the job of his secretary to go around to the houses of people that he might have called to retrieve and transcribe the messages he leaves, so that he can reread them in his office each week. The reason that is given as to why he didn't make the process easier and just use a voice recorder on a cassette tape, is that he probably didn't like to listen to himself. And since he was rich enough to pay someone else to deal with his eccentricity, the behavior was humored for the most part by family and employees.

While the above novel is ridiculous and absurd, I have an affinity and empathy for this character which Adams created. I tend to love the author's work precisely because of such things. I delight in being delighted and surprised by cleverness, and Adams' work is extremely self-impressed by its cleverness. But if it is ever pretentious, it acknowledges the behavior as a particular defect and accepts the joke on itself with a smile.

Similar feelings and affinities abound when I read G.K. Chesterton. Both authors are deliciously eloquent and I aspire to their turns of phrase and joy at looking at the world with fondness. They each remark on the everyday oddities that all too often we learn to take for granted as natural parts of life. They ask the question as to "Why we give such things a free ride? What if an element of the practice were tweaked to be exaggerated to grotesque magnitude or minimized to the simplest iteration without any edifices?" It takes a certain deftness to perform such delicate surgery on perspectives of an audiences' minds and allow them to see the world anew with greater clarity and awe.

But these are the authors who speak to me and my understanding. There are other writers and speakers who are able to convey the same message, tailored to a different audience with different relative positions and connections to correlate ways of understanding ideas and information.

I hope you find them. That these people who share your enthusiasms, interests, and mindset structure are located and that you are able to learn from and be challenged by them.