floaters not sinkers

are you a floater or a sinker?
do you consider yourself a floater?
i do -- consider myself a floater --in the water, except then maybe, i'm not as solid as i'd hoped.
we have, here, yet another existential oxymoron.

this transitions, ackwardly so, to the issue of dense expection.
when someone is denser than i'd hoped, i wonder: what is this source of visceral aversion?
both in mass and in thought, dense is not all that appealing to me.
light and airy are things that make me feel, well, more alive.

the topic, then becomes an issue of density.

we live in a dense society -- where the "per capita" far exceeds the reasonable need for personal space.
the morning commute on the N-Judah train is a perfect sample of said "case-in-point."
it's the density (pun intended) that makes me uneasy. it is the lack of consideration which also makes me -- uneasy.
still, i refuse to believe that 3 strong guys are so impolite that they to continue to sit while their pregnant co-riders remain standing: could they possibly BE that dense?!? one hopes they are simply oblivious...would this somehow make their "dense-ness," in our already overcrowded density, more tolerable?!?

from there, from that much too cramped sardine-line sample of humanity, i get off the train -- in a tunnel. as the escalator climbs to the surface, i experience a those few blocks of city air on the way to my office. there, i sit, in a scattering of cubes whose walls are much too close and not quite high enough. it is there that i lived for the better part of my past year -- amongst a density of schedules, tensions, and nervous energy.

by the noon-hour, i'm re-"fresh"-ed (if you can call it that) by the secondary 2 blocks of downtown SF city air. (while the weather is nice out, it is on those days that i am wishing the distance from my work to my pool were just a few more blocks. but, then i remember that i'm relieved because it is i, who has created a dense efficiency in my overcrowded schedule by working-out so close to work. (whew! these words are crowding my brain.)

it is at this point in my day, i climb into a cleverly groomed underground pool whose walls have no windows for natural light nor any views to the outside. once again, on this typical day, i'm confronted by a false dense pool population. i call it " false," because it's not dense at all: three swimmers per lane does not a crowded pool make, however, because of imploding sense of overwhelm, i feel crowded.

we contrast this with a mere 1.5 years ago, when i happily tolerated 15 in my public pool just for the freedom of a swim.

here, ladies and gentleman, we have a case of relativity.
the spoils compared to the other spoils.

but the issue of feeling overcrowding does not go away. i change lanes 3 times and still find that everyone wants to share MY lane. have i become a "crowd me" magnet?
perhaps this is somehow related to the fact that i'm physically a small-er person. could it be that because i take less physical space than others on this planet that i seem to feel that i "suffer" personal overcrowding -- on the bus, in the pool, in my life. we digress...

so after all this density, namely:
the pushing-and-shoving, the mental overcrowding, the self-imposed agenda crowding,
i find a desire to remain a floater.
one tangible theory could be that there's less tangible mass in doing so.
still, i prefer to think of it as a new campaign for "less density" -- in whatever we do.

big little questions

Can someone know so little about you and know you so well?

Do you believe in genetic predisposition?
Or more apropos --- genetic projection??
Or,can we all just chalk it all up to chemistry?

Lots of questions for something that should seem to have obvious answers.

Some call it religion, others call it serendipity...
Sometimes, there are events, happenings, or people that come into our lives for no other reason than to make us question and realize that we can do nothing but know -- deep in our hearts, that they will be significant.

There are times in our lives that are so wrought with pain and then suddenly balanced with inconceivable joy that we then realize this is the reason we persist, subsist, and exist.

It is during these times when we can imagine that Fate has taken some big bucket of water, or even more specifically a cattle prod and has poked us right into the side, over and over, until we feel either the wave wash over us or some big sharp pain that makes us sit up and pay attention.

There are, indeed, times for the individual (and for the masses) that we wonder -- why events or people or things in our lives are so clearly meant to be, (clearly necessary,) and yet so
very unexplainable. These are things that come into our our lives which can be explained only *outside* of reasonable doubt. There are people whom we meet -- that we feel as if we've known sometime in our pasts or that we feel we are destined to know, for some unforeseable reason to hopefully be explained in our futures.

This is where we must once again return to our beliefs, our need to trust, or our simple instincts.
You can't force a poke, or make a wave wash over you; you can sit back and recognize the joy in doing so when it does.

Simply knowing that it's the excitement of the unknown that helps us persist.
No matter how grim, it's the potential of hope that must reside at the core of our beliefs - whatever those might be.