Whenever we chat about our favorite television shows, we have to preface it with where are you in the season or which season are you watching. We all arrive at our entertainment on different dates now, different times. Maybe we see it the same day but you see it live and I watch it three hours later or in the morning with my coffee. People are growing accustomed to waiting a day or two to blog about key episodes or update the show’s website. Well, the considerate ones do. There are always the spoilers who seem to get a certain level of joy out of ruining a show’s ultimate surprise ending for anyone who happens to be scrolling their social media feed that evening. Gee, thanks for that. Jerk.
I was thinking about this the other day and how we all consume so differently now than when I was a voracious reader, music listener, TV viewer and moviegoer at age 19, 30 years ago. For any of those different areas of entertainment, we find ourselves an individual channel that works for us — maybe it’s Spotify or iTunes or satellite radio’s SirusXM or heck, CDs or vinyl still for your music… for TV and movies, too many choices to mention. For books, sure, we’ve got paper versus electronic, read it yourself versus have someone else read it by subscribing to Audible.com which wins my award for sneakiest ads which seem to be anywhere and everywhere that I least suspect to find them!
Sometimes it feels like we’re all running different races to different places at different paces! Some are embarked on a sprint, others more of a walk and still others, are racing from the couch. Remember when we learned about the different phases of the moon in science class or on the field trip to the local planetarium? Sometimes I wish I had gotten to attend school up north when I was a kid — those field trips alone! Man oh man! I think of the dazzling array of museums and learning attractions I’d have available to me like the mesmerizing Adler Planetarium which I always adored on visits back home to Chicago.
So many wonderful things (and you’d think baseball games would be enough) but there’s the awe-inspiring Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of Natural History, and The Art Institute of Chicago (one of the most fabulous art museums anywhere…and not just because Ferris Bueller and his friends dug it, too!)
And boy, did they ever!
But I loved whenever you’d learn at the planetarium or in science class, about the stars and galaxies, planets and their moons. It was always interesting to think about your own place in the universe, especially when it finally hit you in the noggin’ just how vast this universe is.
So I return to the lesson about the different phases of the moon throughout the month.
We’d test our knowledge by looking up at the darkness as a child and trying to discern if what we saw was a half moon and if that meant it was day 8 or day 23. We first heard terms like waxing gibbous and waning crescents, or were they waning gibbous and waxing crescents? I kept confusing the two and calling them gibbons instead of gibbous, but one thing that I knew for sure: we definitely weren’t talking about monkeys or dinner rolls!
Oh, here I go off on a magic carpet of lost focus yet again. Why am I writing about TV watching, moon phases, Ferris Bueller and monkeys? Wow, I really did cross a lot of territory in less than 10 paragraphs, didn’t I? Heh. Sorry about that.
I bring this up because we are a lot like those phases of the moon. Each of us moves at our speed, in our own mode of transportation, sometimes even in our own preferred lanes. We try to stay in touch with each other, engage and interact both online and for those fortunate (or unfortunate) to cross paths with us in person, meet up in the overused and frequently air-quoted “real life” as opposed to this pretend online life, I guess. But it can be difficult to get our lives in synch with one another when we’re all exploring different things in different spaces at different times and at different speeds. It’s a miracle we are able to keep a date and meet up with anyone at all!
Where are you on the moon phase cycle? Some of us prefer to stay put in the same phase for a while. It can be stressful and downright confusing to move to the next phase. I might just want to stay here where I’m comfortable and I know what is what, for a little while longer. There are still many things for which I feel I’m completely ‘new moon,’ in total darkness, and others, where I feel aglow and brimming over (full, you might say!) with enlightenment.
I wish we all could approach things we don’t know or understand with the same innocence and wonder we once had as kids. We didn’t mind being in the dark then. It was okay that we didn’t have all of the answers. And back then, we didn’t know whether we should ever expect to have all of them or if we would continue to live our lives always asking questions, learning new things and finding new areas of darkness to explore and expand that light.
Maybe we should all aspire to approach our world like New Moon kids once again. Let’s be forgiving of our darkness and what we don’t know, but never give up aspiring to dance in the brightness of knowledge. Is it really that hard to admit that maybe we don’t have all of the answers and that it’s okay? Thanks for reading. ~ Chris K.
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