I was awake shortly before my alarm went off at 5:30. Elsa didn't limp this morning as she did yesterday. I had done some work on her bad leg while I watched TV last night. Did my work help? I don't know. If it doesn't resolve over a couple of days, it will be time to have the vet looked at it. I suspect there is some dysplasia. If so, there is nothing I can do about it.
I called Dorothy on my walk. She still had no electricity, and PSE&G predicted it would be back on by Sunday. However, most of the homes in her neighborhood have had power since last night. She could get no information on what was going on. People are calmer if they have an explanation for what is going on and what is going to be done about it. Enduring a difficult situation is bearable if we can understand it. How do animals cope?
There were five of us for yoga today. One was a fellow who had hurt himself sitting down and completely missed the chair. Ow! Yvette is fantastic in how she watched each one of us, advising and supporting us.
After I meditated, I headed out to do chores. The first stop was the bank. I had accumulated several checks which had to be deposited. Among them was my check from the Treasury Department, the stimulus check for $2400. As I had suspected, the sum included Mike as well as me. I had to return the additional funds immediately. Once that check was deposited, I headed over to the post office to mail my personal check of $1200, Mike's share, to the Fresno IRS office by certified mail. My accountant said to document everything. While at the post office, I mailed Dorothy the three solar lanterns.
B. gave me a solar lantern a while ago. They don't throw off a great deal of light, but enough to find your way around in the dark and find the flashlights. Since these lanterns are solar-powered, I leave them sitting on a table on the lanai so that they are exposed to the sun daily. That means if there is a blackout at night, I can easily find one and then look for other light sources. I don't often use flashlights. The battery-powered ones are dead by the time I need them. These lanterns give me enough light to locate batteries and get my flashlights set up.
My next stop was Island Naturals. They had the pumpkin seeds and golden flax seed that I was looking for. I passed a delicious-looking plum in the produce section. I bought it. As I was online for check out, a woman approached me as if she knew me asking," How are you, lovely lady?" I didn't have a clue who she was. Although I had noticed her and had a nagging feeling that I did know her from somewhere. It was Heather, the Bikram teacher.
Heather had to lower her mask before I recognized her. Boy, it was good to see her. She opened a checkout counter just for me and closed it immediately after. I showed her how I used her advice to move my jaw to the left and how it impacted my spine all the way down to my hips. That was not the case earlier. This effect is possible because my core muscles are more relaxed and don't block the movement. Yes, I am doing much better, but I am also pushing the muscles around my left hip, and it hurts.
I stopped off at the transfer station next. I had planned to stop there to drop off the cardboard I had accumulated. I added my weekly garbage to that since I forgot to put it out for pickup yesterday. Fortunately, there was no line for the trash drop-off. I don't go to the transfer station often' it took me a minute to be clear where a drop-off chute was. When I finished there, I drove down to the recycling section and dropped off the cardboard.
Costco was my next stop. Forget it. The line was super long, snaking back on itself twice over. While it looked like the line was moving quickly, I thought I would stick with it. Then the line came to a halt. I'd went back to my car and drove home. I wasn't desperate enough to wait. Once I had my food put away, I plugged in my car to charge it.
B. came up to show me how to inflate the solar lanterns I bought for Dorothy and myself. I made a video of him to send to Dorothy. I couldn't figure it out on my own, and there were no instructions.
I relaxed and listened to NPR. Pete Hamill just died, and they were playing some old interviews with him. He was from a different era in the news, before the Internet, before cell phones.
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Musings:
I wrote about achieving neurological harmony through shared experiences, singing together, attending a rock concert, or a Hitler-like rally. The TED presenter gave an example of parent-child entrainment. He showed a video of his wife and their infant child making the same sound. You could see the delight in both of them.
I believe our very intellects are developed through entrainment. Some think everything is genetic. Someone is born with intellectual ability. Yes, genetics has a role in our intelligence. But I believe nurture plays a more significant role than we acknowledge.
An infant entrains with a parent as much as possible. There aren't a lot of independent thoughts besides physical discomfort and a desire for relief. If I'm right, we almost make copies of our parents' thought patterns in our own nervous system without, yes without, having the actual thoughts.
What goes on in our brain is, first and foremost electrical and chemical. No one knows how those physical impulses are 'translated' into what we recognize as thoughts. If young children, preverbal even, are exposed to sophisticated brain patterns in adults, they will duplicate them – if. . . . . AH, yes, that if. It is a biggy. If they feel comfortable being like the other person. Children make Xeroxed copies of their parents' brains through entrainment. There are differences because they don't only entrain with their parents, and there are other environmental factors.
We want to be like someone we like. There's a reason the word 'like' has two meanings. One to be similar too; the other to find pleasing. We find pleasing those who are similar to us. We find displeasing those who are dissimilar to us. It's built into us through evolution.
Like all traits, this can be adapted for modern-day life. We lived in small groups, family groups of no more than thirty traveling across the savanna when we were evolving. But now we are exposed to so many people, all from different backgrounds. My husband's background was similar to mine in many ways, but he was not the boy next door. We didn't go to the same school, with the same teachers, or the same religious institution with the same leaders; we didn't go to the same entrainment with the same people. We weren't entrained together.
There are still people who live that way. There are some enclaves of religious groups whose lives do look like what I described above. The sense of well-being and safety is indeed enviable. No wonder they support Trump, who promises a return of 'Christian values." I can appreciate they don't want their way of life disrupted. I sympathize deeply.
However, our world has changed too much. Population increase has made us a global community. We can't put that genie back in the bottle. It used to be that every single town had its own clock time. As you moved from one town to the next, the time would be different. For example, the time in Hilo, an hour's drive away, would have been different from here in Kona. Time would be determined by when the sun was at its peak over that spot on the earth. The pony express, and then the railroad needed that to change. They needed a standardized time that would be the same from town to town. The development of trains that traveled across the country forced more standardization. Then air flight, and finally the Internet. We are constantly dealing with people who are not like us, many of whom we do not feel comfortable with.
Some think it requires a return to Christian values, but the harmony within a group is much older than Christ's birth. I agree, this harmony, or a close as we can get to it, is the desirable state. However, we have to deal with the reality of our current world. The problem is population growth. Towns were once separated by miles and miles of uninhabited land. Now, towns bleed into each other. This is the reality of our current lives.
The only way to get back to our original state is to bomb the hell out of each other and blow ourselves back to the Stone Age. I remember hearing this comment, "I don't know what weapons we are going to use in WWIII, but I do know what weapons we will use after that: sticks and stones." Do we really want to go back there? We would form into small groups, those of us who survived and rekindle tribal life.
There is another option. Religions have responded to this change in our societies. As every town had its own time, every tribe had its own religion. As populations increased, monotheism developed, a single deity, all the tribes could worship together.
Christ offered a solution to the discomfort of disharmony. The instructions are to look for Christ in everyone. This doesn't just mean finding some redeeming value in the poor and disenfranchised. This means having that of Christ in me seeking out that of Christ in you. While this is expressed in Christian terms, it is not limited to Christian values or those who believe in Christ. Many Christians have zero capacity to do this with others, even considering it some silly sentimental aspect of Christianity. They have no tolerance for those who are different from them. If we look for the "Christ' in all people, finding it in the people, we don't like, even if they are not looking for it in us.
I'm going to reduce this to neurological terms. Finding that part in the other that is willing to entrain with me. If we're looking for complete entrainment, I think we're all screwed. We have to find partial entrainment to be enough, to look for those moments of harmony between us and those who are unfamiliar. It's a challenge, but what's the alternative?
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