Bonus Post – Filters

“Humans see what they want to see.”

–  Rick Riordan in “The Lightning Thief”

Sunrise this morning on the beach.  It’s funny what a view through a different filter can do for the mind.

Oh.  Yes!  The boys won the state championship Friday night, followed by a late-night of celebrating, a full day of packing and dropping the world’s largest Labradoodle off at his “aunt’s” and a couple of airports on the way to the 2021 Spring Breakapalooza in South Florida.

Filter #1:  The water is perfectly still this morning.  The view is spectacular.  The freeing effect on the mind is noted.  With my journal, my note pad and my morning-quiet-time reading materials, I’m “seeing” differently, and not just because the ocean has replaced the familiar countryside back home.

One of my first thoughts is that it shouldn’t — doesn’t — require a time zone change, replacing prairie with ocean or a bump of 47 degrees to change the way we think to start the day.  That’s a decision.  Granted one easier to make in a new surrounding, but not unavailable even if the scenery doesn’t change.

Filter #2:  It’s over quickly.  A couple of tables over is a young family, kids about 5-to-8 years old.  Still asleep are our 17 high school seniors.  As the family at breakfast squabbles over the things a family squabbles with when their 5-to-8-year-olds are tired, sunburned, and hungry — I bet they’d benefit from the filter of realizing that the next 10-to-13 years will go by in a nanosecond.

I got it wrong more than I got it right, probably.  All of us maybe do.

Last night though, watching a group of young adults celebrating the final Spring Break of their High School years, we realized that these are neat young adults and that somehow they made it in spite of us.

It’s all little sh**, really.  And it’s over in a heartbeat.  Best we consider our filters along the way, instead of only in the rearview mirror.