Weathered.

Today is the first really cold day of the season and I am sitting in my office wearing a winter jacket. My fingers feel a bit like icicles, except they aren't melting to the touch. I think that icicles are fairly interesting objects. They exist perfectly in form during a very well defined range of temperatures and they only really change when we interact with them. It reminds me a bit of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If we are observing the action of a particle of light, we are "pinging" it, which changing what it is doing and where it actually is. hence we can never really know for certain what anything is doing, though we can be reasonably sure where it should be. Or so science has told us. Whether or not that theory is true remains to be proven.

Thinking about the change in weather makes me think about being weathered - it isn't a matter of changes in a physical sense that make something weathered. A house becomes lined with the grooved and toothy marks of the years, whether or not there are multiple seasons or just one. Being affected by the environment is in itself the act of being weathered. We are a particle of light and the world does not know for certain where we are, but it knows with some probability where we should be. It is refreshing to think that all of us are in some way protected from the possibility of really knowing where anything is. It gives me hope that perhaps I might reach out my hand with my eyes closed and grasp the warm fingers of someone I love; when nothing is certain, everything really becomes an option. This is different from the life we are hemmed in by on all sides, of course.

Though in that sense, perhaps it is because we are observing our life in the first place. Perhaps our lives are not hemmed in at all except for when we attempt to figure out exactly where we are in our downward sloping journey. If we didn't care about 401k plans and retirement and children and love and always, always love, then wouldn't we be more alive? Wouldn't we live just as happily and just as easily as that? I like to think I am right in this matter; of course it doesn't matter when a person considers themselves as a separate thing from what I consider them, but I still like to think I am right. It gives me a sense of hope that buzzes around me, and which I casually swat at with unsurprisingly virgin hands.

Sarah Stevens had her birthday yesterday and I wonder if perhaps she was ever born at all, whether she will be born in the future when green lawns are green and not grass.

-Rich

it's not easy trying to have yourself a good time