Category: Evolution

Evolution Trade Offs

2/10/2014

Of course, there is some tech that I’d hate to see die or, in some cases, I hated to see it go. I suppose being raised on the border between old ways and new ways gives you a unique perspective! For example, I hope we never fully lose:

Paperback books – I love ebooks, but every now and then, it’s nice to have a paperback in your hands. They’re easy to keep up with, and aren’t subject to the limitations of ebooks like battery supply, memory storage, or the “please shut down all electronic devices” on airplanes. Hardbacks are a pain, too expensive, and too much space, weight, and trouble, but paperbacks can, sometimes, be the best of all worlds. Sometimes.

Compact Discs and DVD’s – While I love streaming media and MP3’s, it’s often cheaper to get a DVD or a CD (especially of older things, or of TV series, which run sales on DVD’s but never on streaming video). CD’s are a good backup for data storage, too. Yes, flash drives and external hard drives are better and have more storage capacity, and Cloud backup is nearly limitless. But it’s still a good option have available from time to time.

FM/AM Radio – Satellite radio is great, but frankly I object to paying for radio – especially when I appreciate the local perspective, news, traffic, etc. I’d be perfectly OK with keeping the old fashioned radio just like it is.

Watches – fewer and fewer people are using them, but it’s still more convenient to check that than check your phone. Or maybe it’s because wearing a watch is a lifelong habit of mine that I can’t seem to break, especially when I have several that were gifts and have sentimental value.

And I mourn the passing of:

Typewriters – it isn’t often, but sometimes computers have their moments and I’m tempted to raid my parents’ attic for my old Fisher Price typewriter. Face it, we haven’t gone 100% digital yet, and sometimes typewriters could provide a good “cheat” to make things look neat.

Cassette Tapes – if I could convert my cassettes to MP3’s, I could easily quadruple my music collection! They skipped a step! No fair! And it’s so hard to find a cassette player now that they’re all but obsolete.

Polaroid Cameras – I know camera phones take the best pictures of all, but it was just neat to see that picture come out and develop right in front of your eyes. I had one as a teen and loved it!

Floppy Discs – they had pitiful storage capacity, but the neat thing about them was that you could get them in colors, and color code your backup data. It brought some zing to your backup files. Pink for writing, green for finance, red for personal files, blue for work related data …

Yes, technology is great, but you have to admit that sometimes the quaintness is lost in progress. Oh well. I suppose upgrading means trade offs with sentimental value. But we adapt, all the time.

That’s all today. Take care, and have a good week.

Bye!

Evolution of Character

8/15/2013

An interesting thing happened the past few days as I've worked on edits to prepare Splinter for publication. I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but I modeled the protagonist, Leigh Lorene Lybrand, after my maternal grandmother, Lorene Shull Lybrand. She passed away when I was 12 years old, and was a huge influence on me growing up. Lybrand was a very common name in our area, but thanks to too many generations of girls and, to put it tactfully, decreasing reproduction, the name is dying out (along with Shull, and some others that were quite common around these parts "back in the day"). I thought it would be a good thing to keep the Lybrand's alive, at least through my writing. Plus, it's not like she's going to sue me.

But in doing these edits, I realized it's not likely that she would even if she were alive because I realized, to my utter shock, that she's not Leigh Lybrand. She's not even like me. I don't know WHO that geophysicist is that I shot off to the moons of Jupiter on the eve of Earth's destruction but one things for certain - it's not who I planned for it to be.

At first I tried to say well, it's faulty memory. Nana died 25 years ago this year, and I'm sure that the natural degradation of memory has taken it's toll on my own grey matter. But the truth is that I wasn't satisfied with that explanation, and the reason came to be in a bolt of realization at 1 a.m. I realized: I changed the setting. I don't have that character in 20th century Earth, where she spent her entire life. I projected her 1,000 years into the future, into a 31st century reality that I created. There's no way that the grandmother I knew could be the same person in the future I envision. People change over time. We learn more about the world and the reality surrounding us, and it reshapes us. Think about it: vampires were born in the Middle Ages where disease was a mystery and royality in "darker places" in the world had strange fetishes. Now, they're glittery twerps trying to fit in a world that has explained the truth behind their origin and purged their purpose in the human mind. We've learned; we've grown; we've lost our fears. Or rather, I'd say we've replaced our fears with other things we don't understand. I think more people fear the mysteries that motivate government than communicable disease these days. It's consipiracy theories, mysteries, and how we plot against one another. And if that isn't your thing, then there's the increasing popularity of sci-fi, because we still don't know what's "out there," and can use our noodle to ponder the possibilities, if not in this day and time then in the future.

Nothing stays the same and as a result, people don't stay the same. I think Nana could have been a geophysicists in the Jovan system, had she been born 10 centuries later. Perhaps I could have been one of the engineers on her team, if I were there too. As it is, we are a product of the world we live in. Nana would turn in her grave if she knew I had been on an airplane and flown cross country twice. She's have turned again if she knew that Mom and Dad actually got on the plane with me one time - of their own free will! Yes, my grandparents generation had a number of fears that seem silly to us, and the superstitions of my great-grandparents generation makes me laugh from time to time. But then again, I suppose my own cares and concerns would strike them as odd, if they were here to see it. Or maybe they'd share them. Who knows? We're put on this Earth at the time and place where we fit, and that's it.

Hmm, so maybe I did hit the mark. Maybe Leigh Lorene Lybrand is a perfect manifestation of the evolution of character that Nana would be in my envisioned future. You can decide for yourself when Splinter is released through Whiskey Creek Press in November. Stay tuned!

That's all today. Have a Happy Friday tomorrow and a great weekend.

Bye!

Higher Ground

7/18/2013

Can you see the Colorado River in my picture from the Grand Canyon here? If you squint and look really hard, you can see a green triangle down there at the bottom, just right and down of the center of the picture. That’s it. I remember looking at it and thinking “that’s it? That’s the river that supposedly carved out all of this?”

I was surprised, especially when I saw a special on The Grand Canyon on satellite TV a few weeks ago. That’s a huge river! They have rafting trips along it that last over several days. I was shocked to see this huge river with very active rapids. My perception from the top of the canyon was way off. It looked so small from where I saw it, but if I had been down there at it, I would have seen something completely different. Something that was, indeed, capable of carving out that canyon, and a whole lot more.

I thought about this yesterday as I was reading my devotional. This year, I’m reading A Year with C.S. Lewis, and the reading was from Mere Christianity. He wrote “That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well … he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along – illness, money troubles, new kinds of temptation – he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him in situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.” Today’s reading continued the course by stating that once God starts working on you, He doesn’t stop – ever – until you attain perfection in Heaven.

That was the word in season that I’ve been seeking. I knew I was getting mired down in things that didn’t really matter. It felt so much like the challenges I face are the same old things, and I wondered why I had to keep going through this, over and over. The devotionals these past two days opened my eyes to the fact that I’ve been mistaking moving up with being stuck and going around the same mountains. It looks the same, but it isn’t. I’m back here not because I didn’t get it last time, but because there’s something else in the situation this time that’s meant to help me rise to a higher level.

But why is this so? The answer struck me yesterday – or within 30 feet of me, literally – when lightening hit a transformer near the traffic light I was at. I saw that bolt of lightening come out of the sky and blow up that transformer. Good grief! That scared me! I just walked out to my car, griping about how running through the rain and thunder was stupid, and here was an indication of what it really was. I wasn’t so tough. I’m a mere human being, at God’s mercy, and I better be glad for it. And being a human being is exactly why these things happen. Time and chance happen to us all, believers or not, but you can count on the fact that if you accept Christ then the Lord is going to use that time and chance to take you out of your shallow little world and lift you up to higher ground. All of life is an evolution process, of moving up from the level you’re at. We’re meant to keep growing, to keep learning, to keep becoming better people as we experience life.

To put it in the context of my Grand Canyon illustration, we aren’t supposed to sit by the river, worrying about what it might do next. Yes, it’s carving rock. It’s transforming the landscape. But you aren’t supposed to sit there and wait. You’re supposed to keep climbing and keep rising so you can see the bigger picture of the beauty it’s creating, from the bottom up.

I know a lot of this sounds like so much mumbo jumbo to a lot of people, but this has been a big discovery for me. Frankly, I chose to stay offline for a few days because I knew that my perception of life was off, and I didn’t feel it was fair to spout my thoughts to the world if they clearly were off base. I knew I needed an attitude adjustment, and I needed it soon before my head got bigger than this statue in Scottsdale that shocked me the first time I saw it. That’s a huge head, and if I didn’t get things in perspective then that could have been me! Well, figuratively anyway. And you know that this is exactly what you think when you run across people that are saying "me, me, me" and "I, I, I" all the time, going on about themselves and their problems all the time. Well, now you have a visual for that. People that are all gloom and doom and so sucked into troubles that they can only see the worst in everything are already defeated by life. They might as well rent a digital billboard because everybody can see it, and nobody wants to get sucked into it. I certainly didn't want to fall into that trap.

I think I understand now that trials and troubles are likely more the norm than those quiet seasons. Evolution is a process that never ends, so something is always going to be worked on or worked out. If you put this in context with Lewis’ Law of Undulation from The Screwtape Letters (that life naturally cycles between highs and lows and every human being is at some point in the cycle their entire life), then you get a truer context on how life works. Change will always be there; resistance will always be there; there’s always going to be one more thing to work through; one more higher goal; one more higher standard to attain. As they say, it is always something. But the something that it is isn’t always what we think. The purpose is not to beat you down, or to break you, but to build you up and help you rise to see things more clearly; to see the beauty in what looks like the jumbled mess of life. There’s a method to the madness. We won’t know what it is until we leave this world, but through our experiences we get glimpses of that truth, and of how it all works together. If we put it in perspective, we can allow it to light our path and feed the hope of our faith, a day at a time.

You all know that I’m a big believer in the verse in Galatians 6:7 about reaping and sowing, but it goes on to explain that there’s a method even to that madness. Read two verses further and you’ll see that Paul uses this principle not to admonish people, but to encourage us to keep fighting the good fight when he says “and let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.” (Galatians 6:9)

Yes, it’s always something. And that’s as it should be. If we persevere, if we take what we’ve learned and allow ourselves to grow, then it’s ascension to a new level. We’ll behold the beauty of what our life is meant to be. And the raging rivers of life don’t look quite so intimidating from up here if we are truly learning from each experience and rising to new levels. The problems of yesterday should be easier now that we’ve learned from them. They might come back every now and then, but they should get smaller as we progress, because we know how to handle them and aren’t intimidated by those old demons any more.

That doesn't mean that I'm okay with anything that happens, or that I have a "whatever" attitude toward life. I still have plenty of questions. I still wonder what good some things do, or if it really took quite that much to get me where I am, or where I need to be. I ask "why" more than is probably good for my faith or my mental well being. But I also realize that there are opportunities in every situation, no matter how small. I'm determined to persevere. I'm determined to rise above circumstance and the things that threaten to drag me down. I refuse to be defeated. Jesus died so we could have and enjoy life, and I'm claiming that promise for my life, every day, no matter what the circumstances. Because there is something to enjoy in each and every day, and we can claim it. It all starts with the small things. Never despise them. They build up to the big things, to the ascension that brings us to that higher ground above our trials and tribulations.

In closing, I’d like to say thank you, Lord, for a word in season. I needed it and hope sharing it here helps others to put their own trials into perspective. But about that lightening bolt. Okay, I got it pretty quick. Now let’s leave blowing stuff up to the sci-fi and fantasy books and movies, okay?

That’s all today. Thanks for hanging in there with me! Have a happy Friday tomorrow and a good weekend.

Bye!

What's In The Box?

7/1/2013

Today, I’d like to ponder on a popular saying and what it actually means. There’s a saying that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” It’s a great source of encouragement, but, like every other saying, the outcome of such situations is not a given. Trying times certainly do have the potential to make us stronger, but this isn’t automatic. Like all other things, the outcome depends on what you do with the circumstances you’re given.

We all face those times when it seems that life has us locked in a box. People are pretty sure we’re defeated and they’ve won – or lost – and that’s the be all and end all of the situation. I won’t deny that life’s trials do have an air of finality to them, but the good news is that it’s a false presumption. Things happen in our lives, people come and go, but until such time as the world ends, nothing is over. No matter how long things have been dormant, no matter how loudly that door slammed shut on you, there is always the potential for change. In fact, change is the one constant in the universe. We might not be comfortable with it, but it’s a truth that we can run but not hide from. Things that you thought were over can start back. Fights you thought were won can reignite. Things you thought had died can be resurrected. It is, in fact, a disturbing trend in life. We call it history repeating itself, but as a writer I choose to call it ironic plagiarism. Same story, different setting. And if we aren’t careful, we can make the same mistakes and keep falling into the same old traps, over and over, and put ourselves in a rut of stubborn refusal to accept that there’s something we need to rise to before it steals all hope from our lives.

There’s no excuse for this, folks. Yes, life has an annoying way of pinning us into corners. People have an aggravating habit of playing games and throwing around power and locking us into neat, tidy boxes tightly lidded with their own convenience. But, as it was so eloquently stated in The Avengers, as long as the sun continues to rise, we continue protect it. They were talking about the world, but in this case I believe it aptly applies to ourselves. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Unless you’re dead, you aren’t staying in that box. You will come out. The question is, what’s coming out of the box? Will it be something bigger and stronger, or weaker?

Herein lies the key. The times when we’re trapped are difficult and it’s easy to give in to anger, or to give up – but that’s exactly what the world wants. They know these things will weaken us and once that box opens, it will be something smaller and weaker that they can mold to their liking. I say don’t do that. Don’t just lie there, mourning or fuming over your trap. Grow, darn it! It might not feel like it, but the times when others are pretty sure that they have you locked up are golden opportunities to, as I like to say, become the bigger dragon. When they think you’re beat, they stop watching you. They get complacent. And that’s when you do the hard work to grow, to learn, to quietly become stronger and wiser, and to burst out of that box when the time is right for you to conquer. And then you will conquer, because they won’t understand how they could have created this creature that they don’t know how to fight anymore.

I know it’s not easy. I’m in one of those places right now, and it’s hard for me. I’m a fighter, so it’s difficult for me to zip it and quietly evolve so I can have the victory at the right time. And yet, it’s imperative that I exercise this patience and endure the pain of evolving into the bigger dragon if I want a victory that’s more lasting than the smoke and mirrors surrounding me. But I can do it. I know I can because with the Lord’s help, I’ve conquered before and I know I’m more than a conqueror still. These trials might look different, but they have a lot of sameness to me. Splinter was inspired by times like this, and if life keeps following such a predictable pace then I’ll never lack for inspiration while I walk this Earth, or faith to face whatever derivative of this mess life decides to recycle next.

Yes, there are a lot of people that think they have me defeated now – and they’re wrong. This isn’t over. Times of confusion and frustration are never the end; they're merely resistance to help you grow, if you handle it correctly. I will arise and be the bigger dragon, ready to take on what comes next and to seize the opportunities and blessings that will come of this mess. And as for the ones that trapped me here, well, I pray they open their eyes before those pesky little things they didn’t worry about grow into dragons of their own. Vengeance isn’t what they need to worry about. It’s the other little pests just like them that want to clear a path. Remember: snakes don’t just dine on smaller things, they eat one another too. And there’s always a bigger one out there looking for a feast to conquer.

As for the rest of us trying to do what’s right with pure motives, don’t just lie there. Become the bigger dragon. Evolve. Get ready. You’re gonna need it to break out of the box to get the blessings that comes out of this crap while the rest of the snakes battle for survival.

That’s all today. Take care and have a safe and happy 4th of July!

Bye!

Evolution Trade Offs

Evolution of Character

Higher Ground

What's In The Box?

Escape Reality

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