A Sweet Sweet Dream in Everyday Ramblings

I took this a few days ago. The glare, the winter trees… this is where the old competing stables with the ones that were where I live and blacksmith barn used to be and for the whole time I have lived here it was a vacant hole in the ground the next ravine over. That big hulking building up top with the tram lines is a newer building with clinics and hospital rooms of the institution for which I work.

Those east-facing rooms have spectacular views. Sometimes I go to meetings in conference rooms up there. The kitchen where I took the cooking classes is in that building as well as the clinic where I had the successful biopsy last year. The district below is zoned historic so these houses that are gong up now are “modern” historic and remarkably close together.

They didn’t have any problem selling the townhouses across the street that went up last year where the old church that burned down was. When these finish the traffic in the neighborhood will increase. I watched a woman in a large white SUV drive by my place while texting yesterday as I was standing at my kitchen sink.

The mothers of the children in the very expensive private school in the old Jewish Settlement House between where I took this picture and where I live have such complicated and complex lives I do understand the temptations to text but really…in an instant…your whole life can change if you hit something or someone.

Progress is a mixed bag isn’t it?

We are so adaptable as humans but I wonder just how adaptable the environment is?

I continue to heal. I have a follow-up with my surgeon next Thursday and I am not sure if the gazillion stiches I have in my mouth are coming out then or not.

Like when both someone close to you dies, or you are diagnosed with cancer I have discovered that dental surgery is not a topic that basically should be brought up to anyone but those closest to you.

It was particularly awkward to talk about before my big yoga class last week. One student asked if I was having implants and how much they were and another student who would never be able to afford implants asked why I wasn’t just getting partial dentures and it was so uncomfortable for me.

But I actually think it is our human capacity to empathize that is the problem. Most of us have had some sort of dental work, and for most of us it is unpleasant to say the least. And people can’t help think, when they see swelling and bruising, about how that must have hurt and can’t stand the idea of going through it themselves and therefore, wow, I am just not going to talk about the rest of the work I have done except when asked about obvious signs of it to say that I am having a little work done.

One of my younger coworkers, someone I just adore, who I have been walking the track with a few times lately, just blurted out so genuinely last Tuesday, “What happened to your face???” It made me laugh because it was such a natural response.

So… Learn by doing.

I am looking forward to this upcoming three-day weekend even though it will be wet and dark and cold I won’t need to work. We work too much here. I entered a contest to win a 10-day river cruise down the Danube and am thinking, could I really take two weeks off to do this if I won???

That would be so darn sweet. Such a sweet sweet dream.

Last updated February 12, 2016