Raining, sunny, cold, hot and humid, that’s been our spring. Luckily, I’ve made the best use of lots of my ‘stuck indoors’ time by reading.
I’d rather be outside riding bike, gardening or shooting hoops with my daughter. But in the end, I’m happy to have finally found some time to tackle the stack of books I’ve acquired over the past several years. Some books I’ve come by at writing conferences, some came from family and friends and some are on loan from the Little Free Library boxes around the neighborhood.
Sizing up my pile and listening to the amount of rain forecasted, I’m estimating I should get through the stack by the end of summer.
Shooting Hoops and Sizing Up
I’ve been waiting to read a story by Bridget Birdsall that I won at a conference several years ago titled, Double Exposure. It’s a tale of teenagers who love shooting hoops, and apparently, sizing each other up.
It’s what we humans do. We size up the effort it will take to accomplish something. We size up the emotional toll an event will take on us. We size up each others abilities, loyalty, fashion sense, shoe size, heads of hair and on and on to the most tedious of measures.
What we don’t size up enough is the capacity of our hearts, and the openness of our minds.
We’re always sizing up one another as we would an opponent.
Why does one have to be better than the other?
Opponent or Teammate
Main characters in stories are often taking on someone that doesn’t follow their line of thinking. It’s the angst of the story. Usually they find some way of resolving their differences or a least finding a way to get along by learning to understand another’s viewpoint.
It helps to not have the opponent viewpoint that someone is against you, and one must win and the other lose. Lots of times teammates don’t always see a path forward in the same light, but they usually have the same goal; success for the group.
What we often fail to see is that, as in sports, one who at one time was your teammate, may in the future be your opponent. We are all striving for success. No one wants to be exposed as a failure, or as though they have less value or rights as someone else.
Double Exposure
A double exposure in photography is when one image is superimposed right over another. When there’s enough light in the photo, both images can be seen at the same time.
Why not let enough light into our hearts and minds that we can see not only our own image, but the image of others in the same big picture.