Chronicles in Ordinary Time

My apologies for stealing the title. Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/02/25/282516865/everythings-amazing-and-nobodys-happy
Watch the video, also.

“The new view shows a more complete picture of Cassiopeia A, the remains of a star that blew up in a supernova event whose light reached Earth about 350 years ago, when it could have appeared to observers as a star that suddenly brightened. The remnant is located 11,000 light-years away from Earth.” http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/image/nustar140219a

picture of Cassiopeia A
whose light reached Earth about 350 years ago
located 11,000 light-years away
If these aren’t OMG phrases, I’m not sure what are. And we are so complacent.
I am so complacent.

People are walking around with more computing power in their pocket than any of the Apollo astronauts had, traveling to the Moon. And it drops, and the glass cracks and you have to pay a huge amount of money to replace it; even though it’s still in its “trial/return period” which does not replacement of damaged phones… Because 3-digits-before-the-decimal may be a large chunk of a paycheck that is already stretched to breaking…

When I was a kid, I used to get up early to watch the Mercury and Apollo launches. On a fuzzy black and white cathode-tube television that Einstein only dreamed of [slight exaggeration for Albert]. I remember NOT watching the launches, because they had become more commonplace.

Today I carried on almost-simultaneous conversations with a client in London, a couple somewhere in Mongolia and a client in California… OMG

One of the ‘spoilers’ is money. Smart phones cost a lot of money, as do utilities, food and the other stuff that fills our lives. I don’t have a smart phone; I only have a dumb phone that I often forget to take with me on those rare days when I leave my office. Of course, I also have two desktop computers and a laptop computer, all of which run 24/7 for most days of the year. I also have two other laptops mostly in disrepair, and a stack of dead ones, as well as two or three desktop computers that don’t- or barely run.
Money means employment; employment comes with its own headaches.

The cares of life beat the ‘wonder’ out of us. Jesus, my mentor and my example, teaches that wonder can be part of our life every moment; but I haven’t learned that teaching very well. My children, now adults, have been some of my best teachers of ‘wonder’ and they mostly don’t remember how to do it; due to their own cares and concerns.
My recollection of the adults in my life, growing up, is that they mostly were wonder-proof. I remember telling my father that he worked too much, and was missing out on too much of life. I have become my father. Fortunately, my own kids are somewhat wiser.

I wonder if, as a child, I was ever a teacher of wonder.

Tags: artist depression freelance illustration neuopathy pain persistence, Christianity, faith, hope, material poverty, mental-health, self-employment, surviving

This entry was posted on February 27, 2014 at 7:54 pm and is filed under art, careers, children's books, depression, Illustration, neuropathy, pain, self-employment, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.