Choosing Your Colour

I am of the mind that for some people, some adversity is brought about by their own personalities. Note the two "somes" and the lack of blame. I did not say that people are at fault for whatever adversity befalls them but that something about their mental makeup may have helped to cause some of their difficulties with the world. Once again, let me also hasten to add that I speak of the normal situations of life and not catastrophic illnesses and calamities although, even in dire circumstances such as these, the following observations might apply to a certain extent.

My mother and her brother, my uncle, serve as an example in my mind. Although they rather obviously shared similar upbringings, they had different attitudes towards the world. Neither was raised in opulence; in fact, it might be observed that both endured some deprivation. However, where Mom became suspicious and tended to see the world negatively, Uncle Charlie always seemed to be a happy, content soul.

Oddly enough, from my point of view, it was Charlie who had the greater cause to feel that he had been hard done by. He was a man who was not even five feet tall. He never married but lived with his father, until he [my grandfather] passed away. Then, he lived as a boarder in this place or that with just a room to call his own. But I never heard him complain. I think he accepted life as relatively good and fair.

While I'm not saying that Mom's life was easy, I do remember something she said in her later years that might illustrate this small point that I am trying to make. It went something like this: "David Copperfield is on TV tonight. I'd like to watch it. Both he and I have had difficult lives." She wasn't brought up in rough orphanages, and she was by then materially comfortable, and I'm sure that many humans might have readily changed lives with her, but such was her internal reality that she likened her lot to that of an orphan in Dickensian England.

As I implied at the beginning, I don't think people can help how they are programmed to experience the world, not initially at least, for I tend to believe that there is something within us that predisposes us to perceive the world as we do. I do think, however, that, as life unfolds and we become more mature and responsible, it is within our abilities to make choices about how we see the world and our lot within it. I don't suppose that it is easy for many, but I do believe that it is possible because in the end we must surely have some responsibility for the colour of the lenses that we put on to view our lives.

 

Blue Rodeo Rose Colored Glasses lyrics

She sees the world through rose-coloured glasses
Painted skies and graceful romances
I see a world that's tired and scared
Of living on the edge too long

Adversity, the Teacher

I was thinking today that I learn best through adversity. It was practising the fiddle that gave rise to these thoughts. As a result of last week's fiasco of a lesson, or at least my fiasco performance at the lesson (regardless of the health issues that may have caused the problem), my teacher probably made more er em suggestions than usual. Or maybe I was put in a frame of mind to be more apt to pay attention to them and work more diligently on them. Maybe it was not even the suggestions so much as my own disappointment that may have caused me to re-evaluate how I go about practising and learning the instrument. While I can't say this for sure, I have a feeling that I will advance more as a result of the bad lesson than I would have from another good one.

This is not a completely new insight for me: most thoughts aren't terribly novel at this age. It's more of a remembering: "Oh yes, I knew that, but now it comes to mind again."

Back around the mid-1980s, I had the opportunity to play tennis with a neighbour, Mike. I hadn't played much for a few years and was eager to pick up the racket once more. While self-taught adults are not going to set the tennis world on fire with their prowess, I thought that I wasn't too bad at the sport. Maybe I wasn't, but Mike was a lot better. We'd go out day after day, and he would win every time. We'd often play three sets, and I don't know how long it took me to win even one, never mind a match. If I were Mike, I might have thrown a few games to my poor opponent, but I'm glad that he didn't. He did me a favour by keeping his level high and forcing me to get better. By the next summer, we were playing very evenly, each of us winning approximately 50% of the sets. Come the third summer, I was actually beginning to pull slightly ahead although if I wasn't at my best on a given day, and that happens quite a lot in life, he would beat me.

Early in the 1990s, I joined the local chess league. For years, I had mentored the school team and run the county chess league [sic]. Students would come into my room almost every lunch hour for almost the whole school year, and I would let them play. Frequently, I would play with them. Even though we had some very bright student, including the occasional genius (well, one anyway), I usually held my own – even against the genius who, being used to things coming so easily to him, tended to move a little too impetuously.

Anyway, there came a time when, wondering how I might fare against adults, I joined the city chess club. As you might well conceive, in a small city, the turnout wasn't huge; only eight to ten guys showed up on a typical evening. I think that they started the tournament on only my second week. I remember my first game. I was doing well against someone who had been a club regular for years. Then he made a brilliant sacrifice that blew my mind. It really did blow my mind because I lost the game even though I still had the material to have won.

However, I'd take the games home and learn from them by replaying them on the computer, and I'm sure that the others did the same. Invariably, there were a few key moves that decided a game in which opponents were fairly evenly matched. Not only that, but I learned to play at their pace, a different pace that I had to adapt to. While students could often finish multiple games within a less than one hour lunch period, some of the club games easily lasted for more than two hours even though we played with clocks to keep us on some sort of time track.

Without trying to be overly braggadocios, I won the tournament: tied for first actually. It wasn't as big an accomplishment as you might think because the two best players weren't allowed to participate in this amateur tournament. Still, I finished with a higher standing than all but one of the more seasoned players.

In all three cases, tennis, chess, and now the fiddle (hopefully), it was early adversity that drove me to become better. None of these things are serious or important, but I think that the lesson holds. A little adversity can serve to make us better people – eventually anyway. Nobody courts adversity (and please understand that I'm not talking here about serious illnesses or dire mishaps that life may throw at us but the more ordinary setbacks that are part and parcel of the normal ebb and flow of life), but if we face adversity with the right attitude, we can emerge from the process better than when we went in.

It's neither a unique nor clever insight: just the one that has been on my mind tonight.

Another Friday, Another Border Collie

It's not as though we only or necessarily go to the park on Friday, but it was seven days since our last trip. Last Friday, we saw two border collies at slightly different times. Lo and behold, as we were sitting there in the car (chills etc preventing me from venturing out much) watching the geese and enjoying the sun, yet another border collie and human came along. While not quite as spectacular as the one last week, I feel somewhat bonded to this guy. He saw to that.

I did remember my own camera today and also was using my telephoto to take pictures of geese through the car window when this guy came along. Naturally, my attention quickly focussed to him. I think the owner saw me and directed more of his throws toward my side of the car. I took a bunch but walked over and showed him these two: "I don't know what they'll look like on a monitor, but they look pretty good so far." (Because I am posting five today, I'll keep them small, but they're all clickable — naturally).

Well, on his subsequent retrieval, didn't pooch bring the frisbee to moi? And he kept on doing it. The owner and I may have had different reactions. He might have been feeling a little put out, while I was feeling pretty good about being chosen. "Such a fine smart dog with excellent taste," thought I.

Wrong! The dog was willing to adopt all-comers. When Cuppa showed up in the scene, he walked right past me to her. The nerve!

While I'm At It ...

... here's another photo. I posted a Riverside sunset photo last week (along with the border collie) but realized that this one looked pretty good too.

From My Window

Cuppa called me for supper from my recumbent and convalescent position last afternoon around five o'clock. Upon opening my bleary eyes, I saw this sight, or most of it, right from my bed: the crescent moon, sunset and branches. It looked so fine that I went hunting for my camera. Shooting in low light and, therefore, low shutter speeds can be problematic, and some of my attempts were blurry, but this one came out fairly well. The branches on the right are those of a maple tree in our own backyard; everything else is at some distance.

Templatitis

or con-Templations

Welcome to the Christmas season on Raindrops! That's the Holiday Train up there in the header, and it's coming this way again – in two weeks, I think. I had forgotten that I even had this template in storage. It was the second one that I did for the Christmas season last year. I remembered the first, uploaded it, previewed it, and it's a mess. Same with the one that I did for Cuppa. How can a template degenerate over the course of a year, I wonder. The only thing that I can postulate is that I might have had to make some adjustments last year to make it work and I failed to save the online adjustments. But, would I have done that for both Cuppa's template and mine? On one hand, it doesn't seem likely to me, but on the other, I have no other explanation. Oddly enough, they work better in the new IE7 than Firefox, and I code with Firefox in mind and then make adjustments for that other browser (which now works a lot like Firefox might I add?).

Regardless, I do have this template that I had forgotten about. I think it will serve for now. Maybe I will get around to modifying the others, and maybe I won't.

About the Holiday Train: it goes all across Canada and even into parts of the USA if I remember correctly. It stops at communities and rolls down the sides of the cars to make a quick stage. Several musicians treat us a Christmas concert, perhaps quite short as they make three stops in our local area, before the train pulls off to the next stop. I think it's a grand idea. Last year, the train arrived here on a very cold evening; there was snow on the ground, and it was most delightful.

Speaking of the holidays, the rest of Blogdom is certainly able to tell that ye Americans are on one. All of a sudden, hardly anyone is posting or reading. That's understandable and as it should be, but please hurry back soon ... eh?

Clinging to my Raft

It started last night. I was really chilly when we got home and kept getting chillier. By the time that I sat down to create yesterday's most masterful post (hah!), I was getting to point of shaking with my increasingly severe shivers. "Oh, oh," thought I, "this is exactly the way that the last bout began," also with a headache that I was also experiencing by that point. I really didn't want to go on with the shivering shakes for hours, so I turned the heater in the bathroom up to high, ran a hot, hot bath and eased in. Even then, I had to pretty well submerge my whole body before the chills abated.

Then, I put on two sweatshirts and went to bed. And I got pretty comfortable for about an hour … until I started getting hot, that is. Off came one sweatshirt, then the other, then the blankets, and I was still blazing. Go figure.

I know that no one really wants to get sick (ill for the Brits), especially me after enduring that bad bout about a month ago. But I don't really mind too very much today. After all, I have hardly been sick for the past five or six years, so perhaps I'm in arrears. Oh, I can recall a few day things, but that's about it. So, why am I at peace with being sick/ill once again so soon after the last episode?

Well, you see, in my mind it helps me to rationalize yesterday's stupidity. Here's what I am thinking: my body was clearly under stress that my brain hadn't registered yet. It was affecting my mental faculties but not at a conscious level. I choose to believe there was a medical reason for my stupidity. Somehow that makes me feel a lot better about the state of my poor, tiny brain. Yet another reason to appreciate being sick: I called the dentist who let me cancel today's appointment without penalty. Hey! isn't it a good thing to be able to cancel a dental appointment?

And … while I'm still alternating between hot and cold this morning, the extremes are much less … extreme. Frankly, I'm not nearly as sick (so far – knock on wood – and by that I don't mean for you to knock on my head) as last time. I'll stay in and take it easy today and maybe tomorrow, but at this point it appears that it won't get too bad. And it gives me an excuse for my stupidity – in my mind anyway. Please do not disabuse of this little, life-preserving raft to which I am most happy to cling. Thanks.