Monday, May 16, 2016

Untying knots.

What a glorious March day dawned today in late May in New York. The sky is bright and blue and little puffs of cumulus are wafting over the city. The temperature is in the high forties and the wind whipping up 11th Avenue is in the high twenties. There are whitecaps like a convention of nuns on the nearby Hudson and little kids on their backpack-laden way to school are holding onto their colorful hats against the breeze.

It doesn't feel like summer is around the corner, and though I like the San-Francisco-ness of the briskness, I am already saying to myself that I hope it warms before I head to Cape Cod in two weeks for some much-needed r and r.

You'd never know that global warming is upon us, that carbon in the atmosphere has reached, after 200,000 years of human life, 400 parts per million, the climatologists' measure of "deep shit." No, the weather is unseasonably cool--a perfect day to walk the four miles to work, not to think about weather-related disasters and rising sea-levels.

I walked and walked, past, like I said, the hat-holding school kids. Past the tie-askew business men. Past the lycra'd runners and the construction workers and sanitation men and the office-goers like me.

So often the world seems like it's on the brink of absolute disaster. There's the aforementioned climate-change, the sprectre of either Republican-or-Democratic-apocalypse. There are terrorists who blow themselves up along with 30 or 40 others. There are madmen with nukes. There's the dumbing down of virtually everything. And income inequality that makes ancient Rome look equitable.

It's easy to get tied up in knots about all this. And then, on top of that, there are all the work-related knots to get tied up into. 

It's enough to make you crazy, really.

But, then, the day comes bright and clear and crisp. And you find yourself with enough sap running in your veins to walk to work.

And somehow, just somehow, everything is ok.




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