I don’t quite know how to express my feelings about the shooting this morning at Gabrielle Giffords town hall-ish gathering. For the moment, I’ll resist any impulse to point fingers—I’ve no idea what motivated the gunman, and see little profit in jumping to conclusions.
Instead, I’ll take heart from the many people praying and wishing the best for Rep. Giffords and the other victims of the attack. Perhaps we’ll take this opportunity to remind ourselves that our political opponents are people like us, with families and lives and dreams and who, yes, when pricked, do bleed.
It is a convenient lie that we achieve success by hard work alone. (It’s also a very popular one, especially on the web.) We’re often uncomfortable with the role accident inevitably plays in our (or others’) success, crucial though it is.
There are accidents of birth, of association, of timing, and surely many others. If you happen to be in the right place at the right time, you can make amazing things happen—but it’s still very possible to do everything right and yet not succeed.
Pure luck surely isn’t the ticket, either: a quick look at all the disasters caused by winning the lottery suggests fortune alone can’t make a success. You must do a lot of hard work to be ready when luck catches you.
I say it’s a convenient lie, because thinking we’re in control—that, if only we work harder, we’ll be sure to achieve the success we want—is a strong motivator for us to keep at it. Working harder is surely a good thing. But remember fortune when you consider others: they may have worked plenty hard, only to be dealt a poor hand.
To put it another way: forgive your own flaws rarely, and others’ often.
Used to be, when I got coffee, I’d just go for whatever tasted good.
Now I have choices! I can get my coffee at Trader Joe’s, where it’s guaranteed fair-trade coffee. Good for farmers! Or, I can get coffee at my local grocery store, where it’s from a local roaster that uses only wind power. Good for the environment!
A strange rule of the internet: No matter what you’re doing & how small it is, someone, somewhere, is, for their own inexplicable reasons, taking notice.
I’ve been up since 5:30, so that’s three hours already.
This has been happening a lot lately. I have a particular problem with getting to sleep. I’m fortunate that I’m a very sound sleeper. It’s virtually impossible to wake me up. Once woken, however, at 3:00 or 4:00 or 5:30, my chances of getting back to sleep are… well, if not nil, then very close to.
It’s a dangerous time to be awake, too. There’s no one to talk to and not much to do, so you’re tempted to just think—and at 4 in the morning, your mind is capable of a sort of strange clarity, lacking the distractions of the ordinary habits of life. Once you start thinking, you can’t stop. There’s nothing to derail you.
Mostly, right now, I’m thinking about how tired I will be tonight, and how I won’t be able to sleep then, either, anyway.
