It's a cool morning but the sun finally came out of hiding. Still, it's more comfortable in front of the blazing fireplace where I sit, cup of hot chocolate by my side, reading a charming little book, "The Curve of Time", by a M. Wylie Blanchet who, left a widow in 1927, packed her five children onto a 25-foot boat and cruised the coastal waters of British Columbia each summer.
I can relate to the way it starts, "On board our boat one summer we had a book by Maurice Maeterlinck called 'The Fourth Dimension', the fourth dimension being Time --- which, according to Dunne, doesn't exist in itself, but is always relative to the person who has the idea of Time. Maeterlinck used a curve to illustrate Dunne's theory. Standing in the Present, on the highest point of the curve, you can look back and see the Past, or forward and see the Future, all at the same instant."
It's a mere 170 pages, just long enough to fill in the present time as the stock market opens and BHP drops another stomach-churning 55 cents and I look back to the recent past when it was $2 higher, and I also look forward to Padma's lunch of salmon with fresh greens and potato salad.
Everything ebbs and flows. Work feels exciting and then becomes routine. Relationships feel easy and then get challenging. Life feels limitless and then gets restricted. No one finds the sweet spot where everything seems perfect and then stays there until the day they die. We all have ups and downs in life, which doesn't mean we're doing anything wrong. We just need to ride the highs, accept the lows, and do our best to learn from it all so we can make the best choices for ourselves in each moment, no matter what phase we're in.
I'm in my philosophical phase but will snap out of it to make myself another cup of hot chocolate before I continue with "The Curve of Time". Only ten pages to go; time enough for Padma to fry that salmon.
