Day Eleven - On Living Till Dying

The changing of equal experiences based on our age.

Older people are known for having a lot of knowledge from experience. If an 83 year old sits down and listens to a 5 year old, and the young one listens, really listens to the elder, they find their own knowledge and opinions are very very different.

Each experiences where they are, what's happening, and compares it to what they already know.

A bird flies overhead, and sings a song. Young person enjoys it and tries singing a similar set of notes. Children a re growing by mimicking what's around them in order to understand/know it.  

Both people smile and enjoy the bird's flight and song. Older person may also know the kind of bird it is, and perhaps can say so if there is interest from the young person. This is assuming the young one doesn't yet have the "phone addiction" and looks it up in his hands.

Basically, the experience is totally different for these 2 people. The thinking process of a young person is based on wonder, awe and curiosity. There are not the resources from experiences in their mind compared to the older person.

Can the older person enjoy the same experience with some of the child's emotions? It is unlikely. That person's feelings are muted by all the memories stacked up in their head.

But, older teachers, or others working with young people, can still feel and see the emotions of the child. I've noticed that in one of my friends who taught for many years. She has sparkles in her eyes if a child points something out to her while walking in the woods. She also does the same thing for me, with a gasp of "ah" to point to an intricate morsel of leaf, fungus or bug.

I'm glad that my middle son has this ability...to stop and really examine things all around him. He's definitely shared that with his 3 daughters  too, one of whom is now a teacher. But the drawback is that he is determined to read each description of items in a museum. It takes a long time to go through the exhibits with him!

Day Nine - On Living Till Dying

 OK I'm in the midst of reading a delightful article on Substack through Facebook which is inspiring about feminism. I think I've quoted it somewhere, if not, I'll find what was most interesting about "Unmanned." These young feminist writers are so right on! 

Soraya Chemaly's Unmanned

But I'm also thinking about the infrastructure crumbling.

I foolishly have put most of my eggs in one basket...the Google domain on line.

But I do also have the Apple system going for me. Some millions of photos apparently, except I somehow deleted a bunch.

Blogger (a Google product) has recently failed me grandly. I've complained, and some aspects have improved. Must note, complaints just float out into the ether, not addressed to anyone. Not solved by anyone. Just a system that is not a system.

I do gmail for most of my emails. Google. (AKA Alphabet)

I read through the engine called Chrome. Google (big G)

Of course I also have Safari (the Apple engine) but my socialization through blogger works only through Chrome on my iPad. Strange melding of systems.

And Facebook is another system, which I thought was pretty separate, Meta running it. Until I wrote a draft for my blog (big G) with 2 photos I'd saved from years ago on FB, and within minutes the live FB posted those 2 photos again. They were still in draft form on the Google blog program! I just scrolled past them on FB, feeling deja vu, and didn't look to see who the authors were.

I already use Duck, Duck, Go as my search engine, which so far works to not send me ads appropriate to my interests. However, my phone does listen to what I say and then make sure I have proper underwear ads.

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And that leads my thought in this direction: the world wide web is not completely independent of the geo-political-ecological crisis we are finding ourselves immersed within. We are just frogs in water that is slowly coming to a boil. The infrastructure is crumbling.

Where is there true communication? Not the www kind.

Where is my own health and safety, and that of my loved ones? Not through the current institutions promoting it. (consider my recent efforts to have a yearly wellness visit with my doctor.)

The more frequent protests and demonstrations with millions of ordinary citizens trickle through to my consciousness. 

The billionaires and corporations are waaay ahead of what most of us fear. They are already paying for all possible futures, and I'm very much afraid they do not include common man and woman. No wonder AI is replacing so many people's jobs.

Its as if we really depend upon the weather man to know what our weather is doing.

Excuse me? How accurate are all the predictions? All the gadgets in their repertoire fail us about as much as they save us.

Weather is within ourselves. We have physicality. Weather exists within us, not outside us, and not just outside our windows. This is not entirely radical. Just stop and feel how the air, the air pressure, the temperature, the humidity, the wind, the possible rain, snow or dryness influences your very core. Your bones, joints, mucus membranes, mental acuity...they're all connected to the environmental changes of weather. Sure we don't know what's going to happen in a week. But neither does the weather man, really.

And at this point the efforts of the rich and not so gracious to control things still miss out on being able to control the weather.

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Mesa Verde, Colorado. These artifacts show that people much like us were unable to continue their lives as planned, even with their best efforts.