Brian's World

Waiting On A Whim

You know what I dislike?  Lots of things.  But let me focus on just one for a moment… when you are woken up at a very early hour to be told to start “standing by” for something to happen.   When the event happens you will have to perform a series of steps that might take an hour or so. Of course it doesn’t happen right away, so you end up having to cancel your plans and spend all day keeping one eye on the status monitor to wait for things that are suppose to happen to actually occur.  If you are every tasked with planning something that requires others to act quickly in a coordinated effort with you I highly recommend you lay out a very specific timeline and keep everyone in the loop if that changes.  Clearly my understanding of shortly is much different from your definition.

There are also times I find myself waiting for things that I would like to occur but have a very low probability of occurring.  An example to “clarify.”  Let us say that the past 2 or 3 nights out of the past N years of glancing out you window you have spotted a pink unicorn walking down the street (crazy, I know).  It might make sense to you to keep your attention extra focused for that pink unicorn the next night, only because it had strolled down by your lane previously.  I’m not sure that is the most logical thing to do for a few reasons.  1) What is the actual value of seeing a pink unicorn?  It might actually get you into more trouble if you try telling people what you’ve seen (no one will believe you) or if they do they might setup camp right outside your place to try and see it too. 2)  The pink unicorn is under no obligation to walk down your street, for all you know it could have just been lost those two or three nights.  Now that the unicorn has found it’s way maybe it wil never come back at all.  The unicorn is not like a constellation in the sky, it’s not going to follow a predicable pattern (at least not one that you understand just yet).  3) You seemed just fine all those pre-unicorn-sighting days and you should probably revert back to that pre-sighting attitude.  It was probably a bad idea to let your vision of this unicorn have any significant impact on your scheduling, especially given it’s track record for appearing.

What’s tough isn’t giving up, but giving up while still remaining optimistic.  As an optimist,  I have no problem waiting a really long time for things to happen, but I like to have a solid grasp on the scope for my timeline.  Are we talking hours, days, weeks, months, etc?  The unicorn observer doesn’t want to give up hope that the unicorn will never appear again, but picking a daily scope was probably a poor choice.  It would have been nice if the unicorn had at least left a note letting you know if it was gone for good or if it would return at some point.

Thinking about it, this scenario can probably also apply to people who claim to have seen something like the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot.  Someone might return year after year in an attempt to recreate the exact situation when their first sighting occurred.  Unfortunately  it’s not very easy to rewind time and fully capture the causes of that initial sighting, without those you may never be able to reproduce it.

Good night moon.