washing dishes: a father’s glimpses

Reading PT This Week, Without the -SD

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I’m altering my reading comprehension by changing the diet of what I ingest with my eyes. Changing the food pyramid of media consumption so there’s less of the nonsensical news now that 15-minutes-of-fame has collapsed into 90-seconds-of-notable in this increasingly frenetic distraction economy. I was skeptical of much of the 1980s’ if-it-bleeds-it-leads of local CBS/ABC/NBC news or feel-good stories (like Peter Jennings’ “Person of the Week” was a fixture each Friday of my childhood that hoisted charity more than change, single person narratives more than systemic analysis as the latter was much harder to capture in a few minutes at the of the Friday broadcast), which 30 years later have morphed into infinite short videos never mind endless slop. Though some filmmakers and analysts have upgraded how to break down systemic wrongs and injustice over the last 30 years. I’ve also stopped with the gluttonous constipation as 45 days ago, I had more than 100 browser windows open but just clogging me and this apparatus up. I now limit and prohibit myself from having more than 10 browser windows at a time.

As I click on less news and seek fewer political economy stories, I’m turning to what is less familiar to me, one of which is psychology. The two academic regrets that I had after finishing college were that I had not taken any (1) psychology class nor (2) philosophy class. Fortunately, as lifelong learners, we can turn to the subjects and departments that, at 20-22 years old, I perceived as having too great of a the opportunity cost. 20 some years later, I place different values on political economy vis a vis mythology. The primary on-ramp for many, written perspectives on psychology is Psychology Today, where I’ve seen 5 enticing blog posts to peruse this week:

There’s synchronicities here that affirm the somatic triumvirate of OPA: openings, practices, and awarenesses. On page 19 of Unexpected Miracles, David Richo describes them as:

Synchronicity is the phenomenon of meaningful coincidence. It is a resemblance, concurrence, correspondence, or connection between something going on outside us and something happening inside us.

I’m defining this decade of the 2020s as yet another episode of great opening that evoke the 1960s and the 1920s from my history archives. That there is no going back to before, that none of us can return to the past or reinvent a previous decade or era. Alive and evolution are currents stronger than any of our abilities to do otherwise. We are not that, not capable as we not that big nor that strong. This is the greatest presentation of how little we control and the delusions of living through control.