Liz Baumann

Well, I asked for it.

Even though it was quietly and I told no one, it doesn’t seem to matter. As always, the question: “did I bring this to myself, or did I just see it coming?”

I’ve been learning to expect these things – if I even expect them – to come later, have a delay. “Patience is the companion of wisdom”, the sign said. This time, however, it came way sooner than I was wanting, and in a way I never would have expected.

But this confluence of events is one I know I must act on. I wrote of “righting a wrong turn” earlier this month. Well, perhaps that wasn’t a wrong turn after all. Maybe it was to line me up for this. Like it’s all part of some master plan. Every thing happens for lots of reasons. What becomes of it is not up to me, but that’s not important; the important thing is I recognize it and act; ride the wave.

Steve Jobs described situations in his life that prepared him for future events, saying “you can’t connect the dots going forward … you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” I still like to argue that you can connect the dots, most of us just don’t see the pattern well enough, or let preconceived notions of certain event’s meanings cloud our judgment.

A phrase popped into my head today, I haven’t the slightest idea why I thought of it, but I know it has meaning. I.e, I know this is either a “dot” or a connection. A particle or a wave. I just can’t figure out whether it’s the original one or the opposite that pertains to me. Or, both.

No vision, all drive.
All vision, no drive.

Is there such a thing as a “wrong turn”? Some believe there is no right or wrong. If everything happens according to fate, it would seem right and wrong don’t really apply. Free will? Well, I guess then the answer could depend on perspective. I personally feel there is at least some fate at play, in my mind at least I feel I have evidence supporting it, although I sometimes have been inclined to pretend it doesn’t exist. As for free will I’m undecided, but intrigued.

If there is such a thing as a wrong turn, I wonder if I made it when someone dangled a carrot in my face and I chose the stick instead. This was not long after I made a comment about wanting “more carrot, less stick”. I have noticed before that things seem to happen according to what has been said. Maybe I disobeyed this principle, making a wrong turn.

Can I right the wrong? I think I’ve been given enough signs in the last few weeks to suggest that I am going that way. Dreams, where a portion of it comes true within a few days later… three of those. Synchronicities that have meaning to me personally. I say trivial peculiar things and then see them manifest in metaphorical or symbolic ways. I speak of things I’ve realized about myself and then stumble upon them elsewhere. Feelings of intuition that are followed by observation.

Quite a few people have noticed the gray cloud hanging over my head since Thanksgiving and I’ve appreciated the support and advice they have given. I’ve taken some of it. Some of it just doesn’t fit me, and I’ve realized the importance of recognizing this. While I’m mostly out of my funke now, I’m still feeling rather shy and self-doubtful… in part because my shadow has caught up to me, bringing to the surface some aspects of my personality that have been dormant for the past year or so. How my shadow’s return is related to all of this I haven’t yet figured out.

In times like these I suppose some might suggest I look to my inner compass. But when the poles keep moving around, it is probably the worst advice to take to whether this storm. A weather vain is of more use here. Because also, I have consistently found that many of the best, most meaningful times of my life have happened when I’ve stopped trying to control things and just ride like the Wind.

ashes to ashes

I’ve been holding back lately.

The lack of blog posts is just one symptom. I started worrying about whether things I said might be offensive to someone. Not being able to grasp every possible reaction or viewpoint, a few times I’ve thought it prudent to just keep quiet. Don’t make waves. Then I realized I was also holding back things that weren’t offensive but just seemed trivial, or like I was repeating myself.

I’m seeing now that this behavior has bled into other aspects of my consciousness. I’ve been feeling a lack of confidence and am reconsidering whether everything I have been working on the past year has any worth. I’ve been making mistakes, which makes me feel like maybe I should be even more quiet. I’ve been considering returning to the practical form of existence that defined me for much of the past 15 or so years.

This all has me envisioning myself as silently clawing my way out of the rabbit hole and wondering if anyone will notice. Should I continue on up into the blinding sun? Or let myself fall back in? Is there a middle ground?

Somewhat aside from all this, I’ve been observing for months now what people I’m connected with say and comparing it with what I say or think or with what happens in my life. I frequently see correlations and synchronicities here and sometimes I point them out, directly or subtly. Many times the timing has been off in that things are said and later I realize they manifest. Since it happens quite often I’ve wondered whether we were somehow causing these things by saying them or whether the words are like a murky window on some preordained future.

But twice now in my time of personal censorship, other people still said what I was silently, seriously, thinking. This would seem to support the murky window hypothesis. I think…

Is this just an optical (or optimal) delusion? What is the point? Should I, can I, somehow harness this predictive power? Probably not if I crawl out of that rabbit hole.

But I’m still very sensitive about pissing people off. I don’t know if I can overcome that. Maybe I shouldn’t avoid it either.

If I’ve offended, confused or bored anyone, well, I call this blog my ‘public diary’; maybe you shouldn’t read other people’s diaries.

Schrödinger’s cat is a provocative thought experiment used to analyze the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. Basically, there is a cat in a box with a vial of poison which randomly may or may not have been released, and the crux of the paradox is that the cat’s fate (alive or dead) is not decided until an observer looks in the box. Before the box is opened, the cat is BOTH alive AND dead; after, once someone observes it, it is either alive OR dead. You can read more about it and it’s role in physics here.

Is this what the title character in the movie Constantine is referring to when he muses that cats are “half-in, half-out anyway”? Who knows.

I can think of 3 different personal situations in the past year have made me feel like I was considering a box with that fateful cat in it.

In the first situation, the only 2 plausible explanations I could think of are equally “impossible”. I came to realize that one of them is a bit more likely than the other, and I don’t really think about it much anymore, except when it comes up unexpectedly out of the blue.

At first blush, my second situation seemed like a rehash of the first in that I thought I was looking at another pair of impossible conclusions. However, I’ve come to realize that one of the things I thought was impossible is actually more likely just evidence of a gap in my knowledge. Similar to the principle of Occam’s Razor (given two possibilities, the simplest one is probably correct), I will concede that the least bizarre one is probably correct in this case.

(I still wonder how he did that, though… and in both these first 2 situations I’m only guessing what is in the box; I’m still resistant to actually opening it.)

Lastly, someone asked a burning question which I really wanted to know the answer to, so much so that I realized it was better if I did not know. So I have been careful not to seek the answer. A bit like Shrödinger’s cat in reverse, knowing the truth would affect my behavior, and such distraction is probably not useful to anyone. Furthermore, it’s probably really none of my business. Like the character Martin Blank says about his cat in the movie Grosse Pointe Blank, “I respect its privacy.”

A natural inclination is to want to know everything, but sometimes it’s better to accept the beauty of not knowing the fates of the cats purring away in their boxes.

An old friend recently remarked to me, “oh, you’re a ‘sign’ person”. I guess I have to concur with her there! I never used to be, but after seeing so many of them at just the right time in just the right place, as if tailor-made to my current thoughts and/or life situation, I can’t help but pay attention. While I may feel like I see other types of ‘signs’ from time to time, here are a few conventional signs that have spoken to me over the past year:

A couple more that I wish I’d gotten photos of – both bumperstickers:

• Die Trying
• Women who behave rarely make history

I started this post many months ago and was going to title it “Is Charlie Sheen really that delusional?” Thinking: high salary, fame, goddesses… it would be a bit delusional for him to think he is not at least somehow god-like.

But twice now I’ve revisited these earlier thoughts, both times just thinking about the ways he has impacted society.

From blog posts to stated personal philosophies to my neighbor’s description of his shirt, I still keep seeing and hearing things related to him. People might say it’s the wrong kind of publicity; I can’t really pass judgment on that. I keep coming back to that word “winning” tattooed on his wrist, not so that he can read it but so others can, and how that continues to show up in general commentary, conversation and Twitter hashtags on all sorts of subjects… Regardless of what it means for him, or even what other people think it means to them, I think that sort of thing (just seeing the word itself all over the place) gets into our psyches and has a positive effect.

There was and is more I would like to say, but maybe it’s best that I just end here with:

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mr. Sheen.

. . .

P.S. Ok, I’ll give a link that captures some of my other thoughts, here.

There was a term I came across in a book I read called “premembering”. It’s like remembering, only with an element of precognition involved: you “remember” an event before it actually happens.

Recently I noticed a connection between something that happened in real life and something that had been written a month before the event actually took place. It’s possible a lot of it is only coincidence, but there was a certain phrase that came up out of context, and it’s really got me wondering if the moment was somehow premembered. There were a couple other interesting things about it:

• It wasn’t just me who contributed to the written part of it, I had a little help from my friends
• There were two chances for the moment to happen, and I didn’t realize I had passed on the first chance until much later. It reminds me of a movie from a decade ago called Final Destination, where some kids cheated death only to realize it would happen anyway, just later.

I can’t see any way that the real-life event could have been predicted from the written information, and the only other person who might understand probably wouldn’t remember and wouldn’t care. I feel like I’ve been out in the woods alone and seen a UFO: I could tell people, but I can’t reasonably expect anyone to believe me.

Maybe none of that is important. I can’t be sure but I think all it tells me is this: It’s like there was a sign out there in the field of doubt we all wander through which couldn’t be read from the direction I was heading. But once I’d passed it and had the sense to look back, it told me that I had taken the right path, that I had made all the right wrong turns.

I wonder if things like this happen a lot but that most of us are so busy or otherwise tuned-out to notice. And I also wonder whether some of the other things I say or read will come to pass.

. . .

P.S. Well, that’s one way I look at it all. I also think it’s just wonderfully intriguing and every time I think about it it puts a smile on my face!

I remember flying out to Ohio once for some business meetings. This was when I worked for health insurance giant WellPoint, aka Anthem. We were meeting about data migrations or reorganizations or something else typical for really large companies. In a private moment, one woman I worked with – she was heading up the project and superior to me but not my boss – shook her head and muttered, “Crazy, isn’t it?” And I thought to myself, “well, but you’re the one directly responsible for making it crazy. Do you not see this?”

When I find myself thinking how absurd something is I try to ask (1) well, what was it really that caused me to get here, and (2) what is the most appropriate solution to pull myself out?

As the opening paragraph suggests, oftentimes when we’re struck by something that we think is someone else’s fault, it can be illuminating to take a look at our predicament from another’s perspective. We might discover that it is in fact caused more from our own making than our rose-tinted glasses were telling us.

If that doesn’t lead to enlightenment, what gets you out it? Sometimes it’s an arduous process of unraveling what got you there in the first place. Or maybe you can see the most prudent and efficient thing to do is to simply let it run its course and accept the minor inconveniences that will litter the way. Still other times, when you’re faced with one craziness, the best solution may be to combat it with another. Call it audacity if you like, but in an insane world, sometimes it’s the sanest choice.

Things for me often come in 3’s, so I’ll offer up a third consideration to ponder:

Aren’t crazy things what make life interesting, for they add spice to our everyday droll existence? Wasn’t it almost ‘nice’ to have Charlie Sheen’s perceived breakdown as backdrop to the horrors of the tri-saster in Japan and the problems in Libya? On a more personal plain, we might complain about “chaos, drama queens, head games, attention seekers, trouble makers, liars and 2-faced people”, but then why do we spend so much time talking about them? What would we talk about otherwise? I suppose we’d spend more time discussing political process or the steps to financial security. People would likely laugh less. We would probably live longer though.

Circling back to how I started this post – I wonder if this woman was clued in at all to her role in manufacturing mayhem. I actually had a lot of respect for her, both before and after the comment. Part of me likes to think she was in fact quite aware and just being sarcastic, or maybe it was even a statement of satisfaction rather than an expression of frustration. But it’s interesting how some trivial little moment with someone you didn’t spend a lot of time with can really stick with you. Crazy, isn’t it?

Photo by Cobalt123

P.S. I’m still at over 70 unfinished blog posts and apparently practicing the LIFO method.