Clearly I'm still in shock. I'm not ashamed to say it, I feel like I've been bludgeoned by stupidity. My own stupidity. All my yammering about empathy and listening, yada yada, and still I'm shocked when unhappy people express their needs in unskillful ways. When will I learn? I'm just as unskillful as the rest of us. I include you, sorry, readers. We are all in this hand-basket together, and you know where we are going.
Guilty, again! I make cynical pronouncements (like that one I just made) as if I know what is coming. I spout nonsense as if I have the inside track on knowledge about the future. It gets me every time. I act like if I just say something enough times, and loudly enough, that by itself will make it true! We're all going to hell in a hand-basket! There I go, wallowing in the wreckage of the future! I'm masquerading as a person who knows what the future holds, when in fact, I have no clue what's coming! Argh. I hate not knowing. (Not to mention the small detail about defining my terms... is there a hell? And what is a hand-basket, anyway? Whatever it is, how will we all fit into it? I have no idea.)I hate not knowing even more than I hate my fear that good things could actually come from stupid decisions, and then I won't have the perverse pleasure of saying, see, I knew it! I told you so. Sometimes it happens that "bad" outcomes ensue from "good" intentions, and "good" outcomes manifest from "bad" actions. Despite all the stuff written to the contrary, we humans don't have a Magic 8 Ball that allows us to peer into the future, except by using past outcomes as a predictor. And if you have ever lost money in the stock market, you know that past performance is no guarantee of future results.
I get lassoed by my fear of uncertainty into believing I know what is coming. Besides the certainty of death (and taxes), does anyone know what is coming? No. That doesn't stop us from prognosticating about the future as if we have a hotline to fate. As if we are inside the mind of Secret Santa. As if we know what is in our stockings. Let me guess: a toothbrush and a Hershey's chocolate bar. Whoops, that was 45 years ago. (Good news: at least I still have teeth).
We are having a little snow day in Portland. One inch of snow and a half inch of ice and the city shuts down. The electric trains can't run with ice on the wires. The buses can't get up and down the hills. I can't get my car out of the parking lot, and walking on this ice is likely to result in a trip to the ER with a broken hip (I'm not certain, I'm only guessing, based on past experience). So here I am, hunkered down in the Love Shack, waiting for the ice to melt, bored and trying to avoid the tedious task of turning my print book into a Kindle book.
I guess it's good I don't know the future. If I knew that writing this book would be a waste of time I probably wouldn't have spent two years writing it. Even now, I can hold out hope that soon people will find it, buy it, like it, talk about it. Hey, it could happen, right? Nobody knows the future.
