Swoosh

Hello there, trusted and admired friends of mine. This semester is coming to end, and as such, it's also speeding up. It's funny how that works. My classes are nearly in fast-forward right now, and I feel like I have to run to keep up (metaphorical running, of course... Although honestly a rather embarrassingly hefty amount of literal running is also involved).

Which reminds me. Yesterday or the day before or maybe even the day before that, I was riding my bike to school, and as I started going down that little hill that means I'm nearly on campus, I realized that that rushing-down-hill-feeling is something everyone should feel every now and then. I think it's good for people. It's good for me, and I'm a person, right? My logic is infallible, admit it.

Well, it really kind of is. My kids are reading an essay called "Reporting Live from Tomorrow" from the book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. The essay is about how in order to accurately predict how you'll feel in any given situation (for example, how happy you'd be as a train conductor), you should ask someone who's already doing that.

He goes on to talk about how we are much more alike than we are different. This is in a section of this essay titled "The Myth of Fingerprints," which is really a lovely title, eh? But anyway, he describes his idea in a funny and engaging way, so I'll quote him here. "Because we spend so much time searching for, attending to, thinking about, and remembering these differences [between people], we tend to overestimate their magnitude and frequency, and thus end up thinking of people as more varied than they actually are. If you spent all day sorting grapes into different shapes, colors, and kinds, you'd become one of those annoying grapeophiles who talks endlessly about the nuances of flavor and the permutations of texture. You'd come to think of grapes as infinitely varied, and you'd forget that almost all of the really important information about a grape can be deduced from the simple fact of its grapehood."

I love that explanation, and the kids really grasp it as well. In addition to these two lucky little facts (look, in CRW we're talking about sound in poetry, so if some alliteration, etc, sneaks in here, you just have to bear with me), the quote above serves to substantiate my claim.

We are, dear reader, quite more alike than we are different, and if this fast-swooshing-down-a-hill-thing can make me so happy, I humbly submit that it will affect you in a similar way.

So what I'm suggesting, really, is that you, from time to time, get on your bike and ride down a hill. The feeling is luscious. If you are one of the poor unfortunates who has is lacking access to a bike or a hill or (gasp) both, just roll down the window next time you are on the highway, preferably while someone else is driving, and put your head out the window, at least a little.

I think it's necessary for survival. It helps me feel like I can keep up with the fast-forwarding of this semester anyway.