A french press is a wonderful exercise in patience.

When you want coffee in the morning, it’s hard to wait for it to brew a while before you depress the plunger.

It is hard to wait for your coffee when you think it may be the only thing keeping you away from discovering some grand meaning in life…like a jolt of caffeine could kick-start something in your brain and suddenly you’d be allowed at least one decent idea out of your measured quota.

My back doesn’t hurt this morning.

Yesterday I dug a pretty good-sized ditch for a home improvement project.  It was hard work.  Clay soil and a mattock….down in the bottom for the last of it, throwing out spade full after spade full…and then…the job was done.  Now I have to do a little more work on it…and then fill it in again.

It’s funny, though, how there never seems to be as much dirt to fill the hole as what you had to take out to make the hole.

It was kind of a strain to make that long hole…it made my back tired, made my arms tired…but this morning my back doesn’t hurt and you really have to wonder if it wasn’t the exercise of digging that is the cause of my comfort…

SHERLOCK!!!

This revelation made me wonder if the only measure of comfort we have is the contrast with something that made us uncomfortable?

There is a bon-bon eating King somewhere in the world, maybe in one of the smaller countries…I don’t really know…sitting on a brocaded mound of pillows, waiting for his servant girls to peel another date for him…thinking, ” I AM SO FREEKING BORED.”

He doesn’t have any thing to contrast his life of luxury with…no ditch to make him remember how nice it will be when the hole is filled in.

The Picasso quote at the beginning of the post is a good one…but re-reading it now, I wonder is he saying that he does stuff he’s unable to do?  Or is he saying he does things he’s not allowed to do?

I have friends whose philosophy is that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission.

Hey….I’m down with that.  If you’ve built a certain amount of good will…and presented past efforts with a well defined sense of willynillyness…you really can get away with a lot.  A well-timed  “Oh, maaaan….I didn’t know…I AM SO SORRY!!!”   can get you out of a lot of jams.

Not that I’m a proponent of that method…I wouldn’t recommend making a habit of it, either. And I guess it works better if you pick the apples in a vacant field than if you run over someone with your golf cart.

You really have to have at least a small measure of judiciousness in this life.

Ten feet away from the end of the ditch, it starts to make sense.  The first shovel full you take out at the beginning of the ditch feels a lot different than the last bit of dirt you lay up on the side of the hole.

You don’t know how any of it is going to feel until you actually have the shovel in your hand, though…no matter how many times you’ve dug the ditch inside your head.

I guess that I’m a fan of “forced serendipity”…you have to do the work to realize the blessing.

Stumbling into the hole helps you appreciate the sky again.