This week has started out rough. We have upcoming performance reviews at work (the day job). They say that in a well-run company, there should never be a surprise on your review. However, in our company, nearly everyone I know has had something appear on their review from somewhere out in left field. Many times, it's a surprise. But enough of that. And - oh yes - I almost forgot - they're going to have a layoff some time in late March - but still - keep up the good work...
I am also eagerly waiting to see whether my proposal to the National Guild of Hypnotists to teach a class at the 2010 convention has been accepted. That info is supposed to come back this week.
Furthermore, I have sent about a baker's dozen new query letters out to literary agents - the next round in my endeavor to get The Fifth Key published. So recent times have had a lot of things up in the air - lots of questions and lots of ways that the Universe has presented me with unknown future outcomes.
In many ways, the future is a roll of the dice - at least at the moment. So this week has been a true study in living in the present. It is one of those never-ending lessons about how important it is to focus on intentions, which you can control - rather than on outcomes, which you cannot.
Perspective is important, and nothing teaches that more than some of the events of the last few weeks. One of these is that a friend of our family recently learned that her cancer has returned. Another perspective changer is learning that at work, some folks in our building (possibly including me) are going to lose their jobs. All of these are simply reminders of how tenuous life can be. They reminds us that we are souls living a human existence and at any moment, that existence can change abruptly - or even come to an end.
Still another perspective shaker occurred when I received a set of e-mail diatribes against another UFO researcher - quite serious accusations. I know the researcher but am unfamiliar with the particulars of the case, so I won't go into detail on it . Yet I have found the whole matter to be disconcerting. Suffice it to say that it is another illustration of how tenuous our world can be. At any moment, something out of the blue can happen - something we don't expect - be it an interpersonal falling-out or something else.
On Saturday I attended a talk that I wish I had skipped. It was part of the regular MN MUFON meeting and at the time, I found myself feeling quite annoyed about it. To me the topic seemed (and still seems) like a waste of time. I wrote about this whole affair in an earlier post when I talked about the 'Moon Hoax' theory - that we didn't go to the moon, and all of the history of the Apollo project was faked.
The presentation supposedly showed that the radiation within the Van Allen radiation belts is too intense to permit human spaceflight beyond low earth orbit. I may talk about this presentation in more detail in a different post, but for now, suffice it to say that I found the whole argument bogus. Yet it was presented in an annoyingly credible way. Rather than the emperor having no clothes, in this case, a rather impressive set of clothes had no emperor within them. The talk was well done, presented professionally and made to look very credible - while all of the time, the content of that talk was worthless.
I have seen this same thing on a number of other occasions and it is really spooky how something completely off the wall can sound quite believable. This is how cults get going, how dictators like Hitler come to power, how scams succeed, and how world history has become checkered with economic, political and military fiascoes.
Both joys and disasters have dotted our past and our present - and certainly lay in our future. Some times things work out well; outcomes are positive. Yet at other times we see just how easily things can go wrong. If it is that easy to convince a significant segment of our population that events they lived through - Apollo 11, for example - never occurred, or that one particular ethnic group is responsible for all of the world's troubles, then the peril is real, indeed...
So once again, I am reminded how fragile life can be. It may be the day-to-day existence of each of us - threatened by job loss, sickness, or worse. It may be the fate of whole peoples and nations as seen in some current events. Or it may be the talk I attended on Saturday and the idea that some people actually believed it. In short, the twists and turns of the last few days, coupled with a few days of hindsight, have provided tremendous food for thought - and powerful lessons about perspective on life in an uncertain world.
