November 17 - Ostrich Forecast

Our weatherman says it should be a good week to exercise the experiential mind, the mind that notices, feels, encounters and appreciates, and to relax those parts of the mind that solve problems, practice for the future, and rehearse the past. He didn't say—expressly didn't say—we'd be excused from new problems this week, but he predicts there will be lulls enough to indulge in simple experience. For me, that's excellent news.

With the world behaving as it is, my problem-solving mind is prowling like a housecat, stuck inside, while the world's broad problems roam outside the window. To keep it from wearing itself out on patrol, I feed my problem-solver, from my bag of treats, a diet of bite-sized problems—tasty ones, mostly: crafts to be learned, screws to be tightened, help to be offered, recipes to be tried—all of which are nice and tractable, but problems nonetheless, and so my mind is solving, solving, solving little problems, some of which are consequential, most of which are there so I don't chew the furniture.

This forecast finds me eager to try a different mode. Perhaps I'll take a walk in the rain (which is also forecast, by the way), and let myself get wet, feeling, and not fixing, the raindrops.