Today started off where yesterday ended. That worked out well enough. If you recall, then you might remember that yesterday I started to consider how we manage the ever changing world around us. Say for example that you sat down to do some mindfulness meditation the outside world would keep moving along like a flowing river. Things would just keep happening. Seriously, while you were engaging in mediation things would keep happening. It is that constant flow of change that we adapt to and deal with every single day. We know that things are going to keep moving along and somehow that knowledge does not stop the progress we could make. Accounting for the change is an important part of understanding how the world works. A lot of that is about understanding convention and the predictable nature of how interactions occur. Right now things are a lot less predictable and even a deep understanding of normative assumptions won’t necessarily help predict the general routines occurring in the outside world. We are living in a time of earthquakes that are disrupting the normal flow of the river. Things have been shaken up for sure throughout 2020 in very unexpected ways. That analysis is not a question of permanence or of trying to forecast the future. It’s really a question of how we interact with the world. Our daily efforts are like one very small slice of a much larger pizza of things that are happening. How we respond and react to the rest of the things that are happening is what I was interested in better understanding. 

Today I have to finish up that slide deck for the virtual presentation coming up. For some reason I keep tinkering with the slides and have not finished up the editing process. Normally when I’m doing with something I’m done and I move on to whatever is next. That is not the case with this last effort. Maybe I’m distracted or my focus is off for some reason outside of distraction. These are strange times and that is impacting all sorts of things. We move along a timeline and accept the rather absolute nature of the calendar and planning. We take the progression of time for granted and the march from day to day is just assumed to be happening. That is where the great quarantine changed the meaning of calendars and days in general. Things started to run together and days became other days in a string of ongoing happenings that seemed relatively similar. That is probably the essence of why that ongoing spin cycle of similarity was so disquieting. We looked around trying to account for change and faced an unfamiliar timeline full of twists and turns that made forecasting feel like throwing darts into a ferocious wind.    

Interrupted. Seriously, interruptions abound today. The new puppy is full of absolute nonsense to start the day. I may have to circle back in a few minutes and write a 3rd paragraph.