The Journey in the rabbit-hole with Serendipity

Life was made so meaningful beyond the bullshit of the gauntlet and hoops I had to go or jump through for the delayed gratification crumbs of materialism by the interloping visitations of serendipity. Like the Lone Ranger or Superman, serendipity shows up at the right moment to make things cosmically equitable for me. I'll give a few examples to elucidate this declaration.

Just this week I was the only member on my weekend work team who didn't get two consecutive days off during the week. One of the days-off was to avoid paying us overtime for more than 40 hours since we'd be getting holiday-pay for Christmas Day this Saturday. By giving us a day off during the week, the eight hours of base pay/holiday pay for our day off on Christmas wouldn't put us over our 40 hours pay. That extra-day off to avoid paying overtime pay was given in conjunction with either a regular day off or in conjunction with the holiday weekend-giving the persons a 3-day weekend. It was NOT scheduled that way for me. I was given my normal day off, Monday, for the schedule, and then had Thursday-two single days off between work days.

I had resigned myself to the coming circumstance by the benefit it would give to others with multiple X-Mas responsibilities and obligations which I did not have. But being the ONLY person in that extra-off day situation who didn't have a two-day or three-day off schedule stuck in my craw. Then last Thursday or Friday the molars on the lower left side of my mouth began to be sensitive to both my biting down on them, plus the sensation of heat or cold. The sensation was like when the dentist is drilling and hits a sensitive part. I thought I would need to go to a dentist, very soon. by Sunday I had decided to try to get an appointment to the two dental schools in town on my up-coming days off, Monday or Thursday. As FATE would have it both dental colleges had a patient waiting-list of 2-to-6 weeks. So much for some discounted dental care. I then called my regular dentist, but they weren't seeing patients on either Monday or Thursday. They WERE seeing patients and had appointment times on Wednesday. Wednesday was a work day for me, but I needed that appointment so not to have an aching tooth going into the X-Mas weekend and the X-Mas dinner. On Monday, my day-off I called to see how I should put in for the needed time off. the receptionist and schedule maker, told me I couldn't do it on the phone but I could come in on Tuesday during work to put in the request. Because I needed the time off on Wednesday, I told her that I'd be coming in shortly so that the 'bosses' wouldn't be blind-sided by a short-notice request and would have a day and a half to come to a decision by Tuesday afternoon.

I fill out the paperwork for what was the last appointment for 9 a.m. on Wednesday. I asked for time off that would begin an hour-and-a-half after I started work, instead of asking for the whole day off that would've enabled me to sleep-in an extra 90 minutes. I was open to coming back to work if the appointment ended early.

The request was approved, since they realized that because I gave a medical reason for the leave time, I could either call-in or get off by going to the nurse's office when I came in. That was still good, I wouldn't have to go renegade to have my dental appointment.

The morning of the appointment I come in and am awaiting for my expected assignment. I get hassled for finding someone I was ordered to find and have come to 'the window' for her assignment. Because they play politics and give some people deference over others, I get hassled when the 'diva' cops an attitude about being notified, actually non-verbally signaled, to come to the window. THEN, as they found another person to do the duty which the diva was supposed to do with me, and as I tried to allay the fears of the person for what would be a new duty for him, I was reproached again. On top of that, I was told to 'not waste time' while giving my substitute his orientation. I, one of the few workers who seeks to save and make free time so to help out others, shot back, 'I don't waste my time!'

I was growing very sour on the idea of returning after the appointment-especially if serious work was gong to be done on my molars. At the same time, the person who helped put me in a sour mood came up with the same line of the person who had scheduled me as the only one NOT given a two or three-day off with the extra off-day by saying, 'We hope you will return to work after the appointment'.

YEAH, RIGHT-on a frigid day in July I will. That went over as well as Bush's 'You did a heck of a job, Brownie!'

The aggravation by management did not end there. I gave my substitute a walk through so he could physically see his upcoming task locations. We had finished doing that while completing two of the three pre-break tasks. We were getting set to depart for the third task, when we were bothered about a minor task of the third task, which the lead supervisor decided to be important. After explaining the logic of our previous itinerary, we were left to do the business at hand.

Shortly there after,it was time for me to go to the appointment. At the appointment,the dentist tested the sensitivity around the molars. The results were NEGATIVE. Since we had the time,she decided to do some dental cleaning I was scheduled to have next week. While working around those molars, NO PAIN.

It has occurred in the past, where my body (subconscious?) comes up with some visceral symptoms, ailments, or affects when I perceive abuse from others. In this instance the REAL molar pain got me an appointment on a day other than the ones which would've affirmed my submission to the skewed scheduling. On top of that, the symptoms did not manifest themselves with the dentist's diligent diagnostic efforts. By 1030 a.m. I was through with the dentist and had the rest of the day free, if I so wished, since my leave/sick leave was for seven hours. I decided to do some morning grocery shopping and got a perfect eyeball cut for some meat, and then found out that by buying at that store that day I had walked into the senior discount given by the store on Wednesday. then later I got an extra tip for a ride I gave to my step-son, because he got a customer bonus tip at work.

The lesson for this day was that cosmic serendipity can and doe trump the scheming fates and injustices of people.

The other serendipity occurred for the meeting of my present wife. I had learned of her existence as the widow of my first-cousin's half-brother (who I had visited 40 years previously at his home, because his mother was a close, old friend of my mother when she was a girl). He gave me the phone number, street address with zip code of 'the widow'. I was eager to do this favor for my cousin who, at the time, was one of my favorites. I tried calling, but the phone was either busy or no one answered. I was determined to deliver cuz's greeting, so I resolved to go to the residence. I had lived in metro-Omaha 12-15 years earlier and was familiar with the grid system and major cross streets of the city. But I used the zip code that was given to me, and the computer finder directed me much further west than I needed to be. After realizing that and noticing the street address house number, I knew I had to go back east into town. I made my way back and found the house. No one was home except for some yapping dogs and toys strewn across the yard which confirmed this residence was inhabited though showing need for cosmetic repairs and maintenance. I left a note, giving some expletives to the yapping dogs inside. Got in my rental and started my return to the guest house at Offutt AFB. As I turned left at the corner, out of the corner of my eye I saw someone standing in the yard. It was a cute lady looking at me with curiosity. She was my future spouse, as was shortly and later confirmed by harmonious events.

Finding her place, though delayed by the misdirections, made it possible for us to meet because of the delayed arrival by me searching for the correct location. The harmonious events were fateful bonding for my giving friendship and dedication for her, as an imperative and a family compensation for the misdeeds of her deceased husband the son of one of my mother's dearest friends and our distant relative.

Two others I can mention were getting news of a job offer I had wanted just after being fired for a bone head mistake I had made earlier that day. (All foolishness in panic isn't totally persecuted).

The other was the affirmation of a dream being more than a psychological prop of consoling for a bad moment, when the staging of character positions in a dream was found on a flyer of a wake I attended by accident. (The mystical claiming its serendipitous signs & symbols, as its own).

Beyond the emotional comfort zones

Our thinking and feeling is a fabrication of our metaphysical as well as physical environs. Most to all of us grow up in the cultural and social web of the temporal and secular operations of our times. We are creatures (more like puppets) of our time. The influences on our thoughts and emotions come from our intimate, personal relationships and from our public commerce for work, recreation, and avocation. These latter three areas are usually connected by associations in one or more of these last three, as well as our intimate realm. In the spirit of accommodation and cooperation a mechanism of social consensus develops. This consensus provides the conceptual architecture for what we find appropriate and feasible to be in congruence and have involvement in the cultural and social activities of our contemporaries. For most, a stable comfort zone is sought to have an effective commercial-political, or social status within the circle of association we exist. A mental and emotional circumcision of thinking and behavior occurs to consolidate and enhance that status within one's association.

As was stated in the Gospels, each outlook 'has their rewards'. The 'reward' may also be a double-edged sword. The edge that cuts against one is what we have forsaken. For materialists in this consumer culture it is the intangibles that do not support the trappings of the pursuit of acquisition and the cultural and social status they bring.

I question the importance of the cultural and social status, which is just an emotional fabrication of the social and cultural process. That process' paradigms have their inherent limits that have their TEMPORAL justification, which can have its historical repudiation a few decades to centuries later. The paradoxes and inconsistencies we adapt and accommodate ourselves to fit in and go along with the social or cultural flavor of the time, degrade our cognitive acuity and conceptual foresight. That degradation is, 'IMO', no insignificant matter. "The stone which the builders have thrown away..."

In the rabid, addiction for acquisition and consumption, carnally and sensually, we have made ourselves pawns to a Pavlovian process that has conditioned too many of us from our non-compensated abilities to be dependent on externals, from people to things to do the 'work' which our abilities could and should be doing. In so doing we have lost our connection to our organic human capacities.

Those capacities go beyond socializing emoting and accommodating that exists beyond basic empathy and sympathy. Instead of being the extorted pawns of social and cultural limitations for behavioral conformity, in either the intimate or public realm, we can be the vessels of insights and vision to conceptions that have more to do than with our aggrandizing acquisition and avaricious consumption for carnal and sensual satiation and gluttony. Once we go past the comfort zones of avaricious satiation and the mantra of logic which contends for that pursuit, exclusive of other conceptions, then we become liberated in mind and emotions to be free to think and choose from the conscientiousness of conscience than from the social or cultural consensual limitations.

Part of that thinking and choosing is the communications that are nonverbal and can be felt without explicit manifestations. Feeling the attitudes and presences transmitted, as well as the ones you are affected as the recipient, are a function of a cognitive sensitivity and acuity. That sensitivity and acuity comes from the freedom of emotional obligation and intellectual mandarin-isms. When your mind is not cluttered by your obsessions of avariciousness to the frivolous spectacles and distractions, its receptors aren't cluttered by the cognitive noise that physically dissipates your energy and the coherence needed for that sensitivity and acuity.

In that sensitivity and acuity is discovered the serendipity in the cosmic process. The world and universe beyond human fudging-around is not a random throw of the dice, but a choreography of force fields interacting: constructing and deconstructing, then constructing, again, to find that greater synergistic harmony.

This age we are now passing through is the end-times of hoarding and possession that places tangible and intangible barriers between the natural processes. The cultural and political efforts to maintain the illusion of plenty for consumption and satiation are the howlings of anachronistic mantras. As the victims of the margins increase, the advocates and apologists for this outmoded thinking will lose their intellectual and moral authority. Those who live in the smugness of this emotional bubble will witness or experience the deconstructing of the trappings that formerly were the foundation of their intellect and emotions.

In the meantime, those who've gone to the frontiers of their comfort zones will discover connections that are amaterial and intangible to carnal and sensuality, while being the sensuously cherished of one's aesthetics shared in the network of the nonexplicit, intuitive senses.