Patterns ... Some We See ... Some We Don't!

I'm not an oceanographer but still fascinate when I'm on the beach and play-capture the pattern in the waves that I cannot quite structure in my mind. small ... long ... small .... big .... short ... small .... I say play-capture due to the maybe chaotic manner in which a series of smaller waves, for instance, might follow and/or precede a larger one haphazardly. I know enough to know that I know very little about waves.

Hey, Horatio: Nevermind whether light is a wave or a particle? 

What the hell is a wave? 

It's certainly more than simply a bunch of particles!

But I still play at being able to understand and I find that sufficient, for the time being. And I don't know, for that matter, if I'm witnessing an early childhood fear of being tumbled head-over-heels by the big one? or if I'm trying to bring some rationality to the halcyon world of feelings that visit many of us (they assuredly visit me) when we experience that "beached feeling" after a day of soaking up heat. Huh! Mind over Emotion ... or the mental pretending to hold court in the presence of the emotional.

I suppose I was thinking about the randomness of life as I was opening my eyes after a night of Last Quarter interrupted sleep. If I had my druthers, I'd get 5 hours of solid sleep on most nights ... never waking up during those hours -- I'm not greedy. I don't find in myself, M or in the friends I still have or the visitors who occasion my office that undisturbed sleep is all that common after 60. This morning -- still lying in bed -- my mind turned to a familiar sensation ... one I associate with the coronary arrhythmias that are nowadays more an annoyance thanks to the triumphs of modern medicine. (That's a little joke I have with myself ... like trying to figure out waves. My Father gave me a book called the Triumphs of Modern Electricity ... dated 1895 or something. I can't check on that date due to the Triumph of Forgetting over Remembering where I last saw that reddish book in my library.)

In any case, while I sometimes know before my pump goes into fibrillation by that familiar feeling ... sometimes, it just doesn't happen.  These days, I typically have an episode every week or so, though last week I had three; still,  I thank my Good Comets that while for years my atria would fibrillate about 50% of the time, I'm now down to 5-10% of each week. Count your blessings, Howard!

I'm gonna put this down for a bit and jump on my hamster-wheel/treadmill; I'll be back.

The run was pretty good. Heart Rate went up from its usual 45 Beats per Minute to 150 bpm and is now back down to the mid-60's ... Not bad for a guy past his mid-60's.

But my mind is focused more -- and was while I was running -- on the waves of glee and sadness that visit the lives of everyone I know, excepting, that is, the depressed who feel comfortable in neither unbridled happiness nor in the expectable wistfulness of a life that will always have its share of goodbyes ... and, for that matter, its allotment of illness. I wonder ... or, as I'm prone to say, I fascinate about this often.

The treadmill is a wonderful illusion ... it speaks to me:

Horatio ... er ... Howard ... You can control speed and elevation.

You can control it by left hand and right hand switches.

It's all in your hands.

What a great and dangerous illusion that is. Add to the impossibility of predicting exactly what may occur minutes down one's path ... add to that the presence of another ... a friend, a lover, a spouse, one's spawn and grand-spawn ... and the great messiness of life appears.

I have a visitor coming soon. But as I await their arrival, I recall the rule-to-live-by that sometimes I can follow ...

In a relationship, it's typically best if only one person is crazy, at any given time.

May it be Your will, Oh! Great Monarch of the Universe, that I be capable of with-holding my madness when M is down and out ... and that she be capable of with-holding her own when I've lost it!

There are, indeed, advantages to such a blessing that permits waves to come and go in oneself and in others.