18k Worthy?
I was looking at my picture folder for 2022 and noticed that there was over 9k images and movie files for the year. And I thought to myself, HOW COOL! I took over nine thousand pictures this year. That’s pretty good for a housebound chronically ill person who literally doesn’t GO anywhere to take the proverbial wish you were here postcard memories. But in truth, my family albums have always been family focused, even during the years I was at large in the world. As I gathered a few hundred pictures for my magic video program to compile for me, I happened to glance over at my 2021 picture folder and noticed that it has over 18k of photographs. At first I was puzzled, then I went to look at 2020 and 2019 … both also had over 18,000 movies and image files. Then the wave of sadness swept over me.
Twenty twenty-two was a hard year. You would think each of the years in the pandemic were equally awful. But I think there are several pieces of the big puzzle that made this past year decidedly more difficult. But mostly, I was sick. I was more sick than I have been in a long while and I was sick far longer than I have ever been before in my years of navigating a life limiting illness.
In truth, I’m not yet back to where I was at the start of the year. I tried to convince myself that I’m doing better by doing a pivot table based on the month/day of all the nine thousand pictures of 2022 to “prove” to myself that I was in fact taking MORE PICTURES in say November/December than I was in perhaps March/April. I was grasping for straws and math/data is always my goto to soothe my amygdala. No such luck tho … in a comparative analysis of the LibraCalc scattergrams from 2021 versus 2022 it was clear that I simply did not take what had become the gold standard for picture taking this past year. There was not even a line showing growth or abundance as we closed out 2022. But on the bright side, if you ever want to capture the directory content of a folder, go to a command prompt (cmd to shell to DOS) and type DIR print.txt. You can then parse the file in the spreadsheet program of choice as a fixed field .. inserting your own breaks after month, day .. well you get the picture 😉 It was really always just an exercise for my aging brain. Some people do cross word puzzles, I mesh around with technology. :p
Despite the numbers .. I am doing better. Not good. Not quite close to even bearable. But decidedly BETTER than I was last spring. I haven’t discussed the particulars on how and why things fell apart for me. But I suspect in the years to come science will catch up and a post hoc analysis of all the bits and pieces post pandemic will shed some light on the anomalies. I saw some hope of this in a recent article about POTS, Covid and the vaccine. The muddy thing is there are no control groups. Everyone lived or died in the pandemic. Since every country was impacted, we don’t have a place to look that tells us about people not exposed to Covid. And the data that we DO have is crap. The lack of transparency and state media of some countries make it impossible to really know anything about the impact, or death toll. And don’t get me started about the people even in our own country who stopped believing in Science even as their non-vaccinated loved ones were dying.
To say it’s been a hard few years is a gross understatement of facts. And it’s not that I personally, had a hard year .. it’s that EVERYONE has had years of hard times and as we head into the predictable recession with food prices sky rocketing, health care costs soar into the danger zone and more people than ever before are in a state of mental health crisis … pause … breathe …
It’s all true, and then some. So now what? What do we do as individuals, as a community? Where is our sangha? Who are the leaders? The gurus? … pause … breathe …
Who knows. It would seem that unless the answers are on TikTok, it’s unlikely anyone will have an audience to listen. Our fast food addiction has turned into an unreal obsession with REELS. “Have you seen The TikTok today?” my stepfather asked as we touched base on the holy✡️days. Because it’s a thing now. We think things are trending because our personal preferences are programmed to feed us more of what we linger upon. And we sometimes forget that what FEELS like a thing is because we have on our social media blinders in our sycophant community. Which can be a good thing, if we are among our Schnauzer devotees or 23XI Racing Fan family. But sometimes we forget that each of us are experiencing the world through our very filtered and limited set of inputs. Even when we think we are casting a wide net, we are still likely landing in our sectional sea of subjects and circumstances.
At it’s best, our lives are a product of our domestication (education) which can make us forget our innate wisdom. I recently purchased The Fifth Agreement by Don Migel Ruiz because it was time for me to remember some of the teachings. I mentioned to the backwoods southern gentleman that I was buying the book and was joking that I needed it because I couldn’t actually REMEMBER what the FOUR AGREEMENTS where. Now mind you the Four Agreements were a core teaching not only for me, but I bought a copy of the book for every new IT Staff member I hired while leading the technology department at Scripps College. So I was somewhat (completely) taken aback when my husband, who never actually met The Director of Information Technology as that chapter of my life had long closed before we met, said quickly, “I remember them.”
I laughed, thinking he was joking of course. How could he remember them, he had never read the book! Nonetheless, he turned to me and said, “Don’t make assumptions” as he raised eyebrow and a downward glance in my direction. Which was his way of telling me not only was I wrong, but he was prepared to rattle them off, if he wasn’t in the middle of some P2P battle or building zone. I can’t recall which it was. But he knew the work and readily said we could read the Fifth Agreement together out loud some evenings together a little a time.
At the end of the data it’s not always about our null hypothesis or how the bar charts stack up to reflect our scattered pieces of the puzzle we’ve been trying to piece together when really all we were ever searching for was peace of mind. And even though it wasn’t an 18k year, the people around me are decidedly 24k Gold .. as is this bluesy new music from King Canyon that I came across in Youtube’s free audio library. Because sometimes when we move our recent memories in the hippocampus to the long term storage places in the creases of our frontal lobe, we can put a little filter on them and a cool soundtrack (laughtracks work too). That way when we remember the past we can spin the story like an old vinyl record that takes us back and turns our rut into a groove.
