What Neighbors Do

We had a few surprises this week. Although we awakened to clear roads, snowflakes  blanketed the streets late into the evening. Some neighbors received a second surprise when one of our kids, willing to chalk up volunteer hours for a club, shoveled sidewalks—for three hours. I’m guessing a whole block of folks peeked outside and cheered. There’s nothing like receiving a gift you need when you least expect it. Some of the best gifts look like this:

                                         https://youtu.be/235_c7pdHxQ

Good causes paid forward always create lasting lessons. Paying something forward doesn’t always cost money, sometimes taking a couple of extra seconds to lend a hand makes a world of difference. Given today’s cranky culture, now’s the perfect time to put a smile on someone’s face. How will you do it? Let us know and post below.  

The Good Old Days

Fishing is such a relaxing family pastime.  The water flows along, interrupted only by an occasional boater or a duck. Once when we went, one of our kids beckoned the ducks with quacking sounds and then exclaimed, “I am the Duck Whisperer!”  I spent the time relaxing in the gentle breeze, swatting away flying critters, and cringing at  comments about the nightcrawlers’ “blue veins” and their “gooey, white hearts” as the poor worms were ripped apart, speared, and hooked for bait. Yuk! It was a worm’s worst nightmare.

I’m guessing few people associate relaxing lake fishing with violence. Once you combine worm gore and fish blood, you have a really messy event so I bring plenty of hand sanitizer. I doled out some sanitizer after the worm tearing and more after tossing back the catch. I won’t bore you with the measurements of the four fish we caught, but let’s just say several spanned the width of a hand. We’ll skip the tales about the “big ones that got away.” When you catch the really big ones, you better get proof and here’s a guy who does:

                                     http://youtu.be/lcJovDMSp1A    

Jeremy Wade catches the scary fish, the ones you don’t want to know exist, especially if you‘re vacationing in an exotic place because that’s where they seem to lurk. The various kinds of fish  in our waters rivals the types of cereals on our supermarket shelves. Why so many?  In your opinion, why are there so many interesting types of fish, of people?

Renamed and edited from a prior post

Your End Game

Most people love this time of the year—the lights, the festivities, the gifting—there are downsides, too, like the traffic, the stress, and the leaves. Sure, they looked beautiful hanging from trees, but now they litter the ground looking like a lot of work. Few people enjoy raking leaves. Families try to make it a fun time, but it’s only the little leaf pile-jumpers who enjoy the event, and usually after a series of questions like, “Are we done yet?” or “Can we get a snack?” and the straight-to-the-point comment, “This stinks!”

As soon as the leaves are cleared, we realize that we forgot to look up. When we do, we spot tree branches still harboring enough leaves to fill several bags. Here’s how we’d like to handle things:

                                          https://youtu.be/VsNdmRB-kF4

Sometimes, regardless of how painful the journey feels, the only thing we can do is go through the process. It’s okay to have a moment of moaning and groaning, but then we need to pick up our rakes and get to work making things better. What work do you need to finish to reach the better side of a tough situation?

    

Nothing Holding You Back

Earlier this week, someone told me that they bumped their head on a tree branch—not while horseback riding—they were walking down the street. Ouch! I guess it’s possible since people and trees come in all heights. Tree branches often grow dangerously low making it almost impossible to avoid them. Sometimes obstructions stop us, sometimes they cause us to pause, and sometimes we crash through them, like in this case:

                                         https://youtu.be/dz5MGJGmfiM                

Here’s one of the few scenarios where a majority of people side with window breakers. When there’s a task to complete, committed people find a way to prevail. A wise person assesses a situation and determines whether to circumvent an obstacle or smash through it. What situation are you struggling to push through and how will you prevail?

Inside Lighted Alleys

Now that we rolled our clocks back an hour, darkness descends as fast as a poorly pitched tent. I forget how dark the back roads get with only headlights guiding the way. Adding to the night’s mystery, we never know when or where wandering deer will decide to cross the road. On cloudy evenings, darkness surrounds us like a velvet cloak as our thoughts run wild with imagined dangers, like this:   

                                         https://youtu.be/RU8nalnppLk      

A few extra precautions will help us stay safe. For instance, trust your instincts, travel with the brightest light, and avoid roads leading to short cuts and back alleys where danger might lurk. By nature, most of us enjoy a good scare. It’s the potentially bad scares that worry us. What’s scaring you and how are you handling it?       

Without A Doubt

When traveling on a familiar road, we think we know what conditions we’ll face. In the morning, we expect rush hour traffic to delay us, like I did earlier this week. Driving along a road congested with early rush hour traffic, I expected to encounter a long line of cars. Off to the left, about two cars ahead, I spotted an escape route. At that moment, the two cars in front of me made the left turn revealing an open road with the closest car was about twenty yards away. No rush hour traffic in sight. I jumped to conclusions based on what I believed, and so did these guys:

                                     https://youtu.be/BdFHCeszgCw

We’re quick to look at a situation, and make judgement calls without considering all sides, or even a few facts. If we spend a little time investigating—asking, the whens, hows, or whys—imagine what we might learn. When is the last time you jumped to a conclusion?

Remember the Time

The atmosphere feels wrong. With October over and the ghouls put away, we normally tumble headlong into holiday preparations. The stores responded on cue by selling everything we need to move forward, but given the 70-degree temperatures, things feel off-kilter. The weather suggests showers, flowers, and endless sunshine as if spring and summer are around the corner. Sea-saw temperatures leave us guessing about what tomorrow holds. Let’s hope it’s not this scenario:

                                         https://youtu.be/St1AqmmQ3Io

 We’re living in unprecedented times, breaking records on all fronts—in the weather, in the culture, and in our political climate. What unprecedented life event will you always remember?