Sunday, September 23, 2012

Weather forcast


This morning a biker (the pedal kind) broke down right in front of my house. He was standing there starring into my yard. I thought at first he was going to rush into the grass and tear down my Obama/Biden sticker. People just HATE Joe Biden…

Anyway, I went out to have a visit and to protect my property rights.

Come to find out, the guy is a doctor from Philadelphia. We visited and had a very nice chat. He asked about Dallas and I told him that when you consider how mild a summer we had here compared to the middle of the country and to the East Coast, it wasn’t a bad place to live. He asked about last year. I told him it isn’t a good place to live, either.

Funny how weather can affect our view of the world.

I remember being in the mountains late one summer when a freaky snowstorm hit us while fishing the beautiful western rivers. As a Texan who gets to see little snow, I thought it was ‘way cool’, as my daughters might say. The white crusting of snow everywhere, the cold temperatures, erasing the hot afternoons – it was heaven.

But my fishing guide, a man who lived in those environs, hated every minute of it. You see he knew it was a harbinger of things to come – but the first of wave after brutal wave of storms that would pass over his land, dumping countless inches of the white powder. Winter was starting early for him, and he wasn’t pleased.

Compare this to the scene in Spain a few years ago when my family coward on the beach, not wishing to stick even our toes into the icy-cold Mediterranean Sea, while a Russian family, not more than ten meters (I did that because we are in Spain in this part of the blog) from us played and frolicked in those very same waters. Perspective. The water to them, was anything but icy. They had seen temperatures well near Zero Fahrenheit for most of the wintertime, while the coldest we had been in Texas that year was a balmy 21f.

Now all this weather talk is merely a metaphor for America. It is there to remind us that we all have totally different perspectives on many things, the daily temperature is just one of them. The daily onslaught of politics is another.

But whatever your beliefs, whatever your political leanings, I remind you, that things will change. And depending on the temperature in your own soul, it may be comfortable or it may not. You are the one who must adjust. The world does not change for you.




















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