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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