Oscar Pistorius Won't Ruin My Day

It's snowing outside and it looks like I'm inside one of those shake-up globes with the white stuff coming down. Or is it falling up? Hard to tell sometimes. Why we love winter, the sense of unreality we get, the upside-downness. Is that even a word? When it's snowing, the whole world comes to a stop. No getting around it. But it all depends. Perception is everything in this wintery world, and this fact -  the dominant role perception plays in everything we think and do -  could be a tragedy, or a great benefit. You're stuck, the snow's coming down, you have to stop and look at things in a fresh way, and sometimes life seems empty, not as good as it could be, the green-eyed monster of envy is staring back at you from that Facebook post, just got a rejection letter from a job application, and, like a car going off the road, before you know it, you're mired in depression and negativity.

More and more I find that much of life comes down to the theory of relativity. It all depends on the vantage point of the observer. Even more, this vantage point is also relative to the internal condition that the observer is under, which is a changeable condition. And the internal condition of an observer is subject to what exactly? What is it that flips the switch so the life energy is flowing one way or the other? Does anyone know for sure? No, because we don't know how the brain functions, or even what it is at its deepest levels. Sometimes our mood is a conscious decision, but sometimes it isn't. And that's when you get stuck, when the decision as to point of view remains unconscious and out of the realm of executive functioning.

I just read a great blog post about how to remember your dreams. The trick is to keep your eyes closed when you first awake and try to carry one thing, one image from the dream with you as you come into the waking world. The same thing could be applied to those days when we wake up and it seems that the world is crashing down in hopelessness. Bladerunner has massacred his beautiful girlfriend. The Pope is resigning because of a secret report detailing blackmail and gay sex rings in the Vatican. Nobody and nothing on earth is as it seems. It's clear as the nose on the end of your face that everything is pointless and there's no redeemable feature to your life at all. Okay, relax. It's one of those days. You've reached a point in your life when you recognize there's an ebb and a flow to things and a closer look is always a good idea. Try to remember one detail, one image from before, when you were still in the world of the positive. Maybe the sight of your daughter working on a drawing at the kitchen table, perhaps an idea you had for an upcoming vacation. Something small and trivial that seemed like a message, a wake up call. There is good. The trick is to put yourself in a positive cycle and remember that nothing is set in stone. The landscape of winter is the landscape of dreams. It depends how you look at it.