Imagine the Possibilities

It occurs to me that the reason my mom thought my blog was boring is she reads it from the blog website.  I read all my blogs in a google reader, which just shows you the text of the blog entry, and none of the format and background.  Now that I have perused everyone's blogs outside of a reader, I can see how mine was drab and dull.  Hopefully now those of you who don't use a reader will be happier.... If only I could figure out how to get something on the side bar :)

I saw the image at the top of my blog in a museum in Utah.  The museum is the one with all the pictures of the prophets, and artifacts.... I can't remember what it is called.  Anyway the artist had done two paintings, one of the sea at dawn (the one I have) and one of the sea at sunset (which has a red tone to it).  They are narrow and long, and quite stunning.  I wanted to buy the painting, but settled for the jpg as the background of my computer screen.  A couple of years later, I went back to the museum with the intent of ordering a print, and much to my dismay, the painting had become more brown than blue.  Looking at it as a jpg had altered what I thought it was, so much that I was not as impressed with the real painting anymore.

I read a book a couple of years ago called The Art of Possibilities by Benjamin Zander.  I was reminded of something from this book this week.  I was engaged in a dish war with my roommate.  She cooked beans and rice, which tends to make a pot very messy, so she left the pot to soak.  I only washed my dishes around hers in the sink.  A couple of days later, she washed her dishes, but not the couple I had left.  I call this a dish war because at the time I was remembering all of the other people I have lived with who haven't taken care of dishes in a timely manner.... at least, in my time frame.   I will forever remember writing letters to a friend complaining about the pile of moldy dishes in the sink that obviously were not washed in the time frame I wanted them to be.  In the book, Zander talks about how everything is invented.  We all interpret the world through our set of experiences.  So my background in dish wars caused me to see my roommates dishes in the sink as a declaration of war.  Zander also discusses how you can change the way you view things by looking at possibilities. Instead of envisioning the possibilities, I was trapped by the rules that I can't wash the dishes because it is your job. Because of the distance I have, I can now see that one solution to the pile of moldy dishes would have been to use paper products. No dishes to wash. Or to change the chore list so that I traded washing dishes with something else so that I could get the dishes done the way I wanted them to be. In my current situation, instead of only doing my dishes, the next time I am in the kitchen, I can just wash them all.  Then the sink is clean and empty, and it probably will have taken me less time than trying to work around the dishes :)  And probably, my roommate didn't have a war in mind at all.