Weather or Not

I’ve taken to asking a couple new questions lately in the customer service shuttle. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

Most of us love to talk about the weather. It’s safe. Most of that chatter revolves around the weather not being quite to our liking. It’s too this, or too that, or simply not quite right.

At first the question was: How many perfect weather days do you think you experience a year? I added half days since most of us do not experience a whole day of weather anyway. Many of us are indoors most of the time. Someone indicated that ‘perfect’ weather might not get me to the answer, or the conversation, I was looking for. Think about that for a little bit. How many days for you?

I modified the question to how many days would you be not likely to complain. Aha! Now we are getting to it. It’s not the weather, it’s the complaining I wish to bring to light.

How do we find ways to complain less? That is where I am going with this.

That brought up the next idea for a question - still in formulation. It has to do with the memory of your last Aha! moment. What was it? Can you do it again? How do we create curiosity and discovery?

I have a little time on my hands as you might imagine.

Anyway, yesterday I drove Matt, a trained medical professional, to Froedert Hospital. It was just the two of us for 45 minutes. We’d met a few months back. We seemed to jump in right where we left off. I asked him about his most recent Aha! moment. He has a 14 month old daughter; his first child. There are plenty of new experiences for him.

We talked about the weather, his daughter, Brain Games on NatGeo. We talked about storytelling. He asked me had I ever heard The Cremation of Sam McGee? I had not. He couldn’t believe it.

So, he recited, from memory, all 887 words while I was driving north into the Zoo interchange during morning rush. That was a rush all by itself. I thanked him. I never had anyone recite a poem to me in the shuttle. Happy end of poetry month. (I googled the 887 word poem this morning at this writing.)

Anyway, I had also asked him earlier about the weather. I say there’s about five and a half days that the weather is remarkably free of blemish.  - just for conversation sake. He thought 350 days a year he would not complain. I told him he broke all the records in my recent non-scientific survey. He said there’s nothing you can do about the weather.

That reminded me of the recent story I read about Krishnamurti. He once asked a group of followers if they wanted to know his secret. Well, of course! They and others had been chasing him around for thirty years looking for bits of wisdom.

“I don’t mind what happens.” ~ Krishnamurti

I don’t know if you can find anyone to read this to you or not. Here it is:
The Cremation of Sam McGee
www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174348
Happy Poetry Month.

@DoHappyBetter