On my scenic walk to the beach today, I stopped to admire this sock which was spun by some anonymous spider whose talents could be better applied to benefit our species.
For breakfast today: a kale and avocado salad. During the seed-removal process involving me, holding a knife and pushing hard (brilliant, I know), I put a hole in my hand. Oops! I was holding half of the avocado in my left hand while aiming the knife with my right, intending to stick the seed and twist it out, all impressive-like. I don't often try that maneouvre, and for good reason. As I observed the avocado-covered knife's sharp tip slip from the seed and veer towards my hand with great purpose, in my head I could hear my father berating me for my misjudgment: "Sonya! Think of the consequences before you do things -- think, 'So, if the force of the knife misses its mark, where will that force go?'" Into my hand, riiiight.
I inspected my hand and saw the laws of physics clearly illustrated therein. The knife had left a small hole (cool!) between my middle and ring fingers. It didn't hurt. I just looked at it, waiting to see if it would bleed. Then I wondered if it should hurt, and whether the fact that it was not hurting was a good or bad thing. Sooo, there I was, standing in the kitchen, watching, looking into the hole... la la la. Finally, some blood. Hand still didn't hurt. I carefully wiggled my fingers to make sure everything was connected properly.
Satisfied that I wasn't going to die, I rinsed my hand in the sink -- that's when the pain asserted itself like a biatch you just didn't want to hear from because you already knew what it was going to say. And the pain that alerted me to the fact that I had a hole in my hand was a pain unlike any other. An inner pain. An inner-hand pain.
This entire scene was funny to me (earlier I had been reading about surgeons, so this kitchen + knife episode convinced me further of the importance of keeping my mind only on things I want to experience).
No salads were harmed in the making of this meal. No salty salads were massaged, either.
For the rest of the day I made smoothies, salads.. ate an orange... and listened to Malcolm Gladwell read his
Outliers book, in which he contends that successful people (those that have developed a chosen talent) are largely products of their time and place and many other factors, etc. It sounds like an obvious statement to make, but actually his examples are kinda interesting: there are no rags to riches stories; no man is an island (and other clichés); research across multiple disciplines consistently maintains that the magic number of hours of focused effort it takes to master a skill = 10,000; child prodigies just started earlier than most (+ coupled with their obsessive desire to develop the skill in the first place, which implies they have some talent to begin with).
Genius is focus. Otherwise, hole in hand.
Yesterday, smoothies and salads sustained me throughout the afternoon as Goran and I walked along the Stanley Park seawall and discussed morbid findings in forests.
