Life's Amazing (the glass is half full/empty)

Today, driving in the car with the Teen (a young woman who has lived in my home for the last year and will be moving back in with her mother a week from today), I recounted the most amazing thing that happened to me on Monday morning.  While I rarely take pictures and never a movie, THIS was one of those times when I wished I had a camera.

Directly in my line of sight, a large black crow was making haste across the sky pursued by a small brown house finch or sparrow.  I thought to myself (because I'm not an ornithologist and have no real knowledge of bird behavior), "This can't be!  It must be coincidental" even though the finch looked to be no further than a foot from the crow's tail feathers while matching its speed, mili-second by mili-second.  As the birds disappeared into the trees, I realized I'd never get confirmation that what I thought I saw was, in fact, what I saw, a chase.


That thought had barely crossed my mind when the birds sped across the sky in the opposite direction.  The sparrow still in hot pursuit.

I wondered, "Except for predatory birds, are birds as seemingly unaware of their size as dogs?"  (Many of us have heard stories about small dogs with a Napoleon complex and the large dog(s) they frightened.  And if you have a source confirming that dog's don't understand their size relative to other dogs, I'd like to see it.)

"That's one the types of memories I hope flashes across my mind as I'm dying.  That and the time I saw that amazingly large double rainbow (a story for another time).  For both of those experiences, I was alone and there was no one to share them with."

"What about that third thing?" the Teen asked.  "You know, the one you were recounting yesterday.  The school of dolphins.  None of the other swimmers or people on the beach saw that."

So good of the Teen to remember.  "Yes, that too, I need to remember that too.  And true enough, on a crowded beach, the water full of happy holiday goers, no one saw the school of dolphin come in and head north along the shoreline while leaping through the waves among the swimmers for who knows how long.  I was able to run and keep up with them for a short distance only because I'd seen their fins coming at me in the water, perpendicular to the shore, and I thought they might be shark... so, I high tailed it to the sand."

"Of course," I said, flashing my recently acquired ability to see the glass as half empty as well as half full, "The little bird could have been chasing the big bird for some horrid reason I don't really know and could only imagine.  I could have been enjoying what was actually a horror story."  What kind of horror story, I don't really want to imagine.

A close friend of mine reminds me that I look left and don't look right.  I see the glass as half full and miss that it is also half empty.  This is not just a matter of wearing rose-colored glasses, though I will admit to that.

As someone with Asperger's Syndrome (honest I won't bring this topic into every blog), I have difficulty making sense of of other people's behavior. When I was younger, I took care of the awkwardness, the things I sensed in human interaction like a television set with broken rabbit ears for reception, by going around and asking "Is everything okay?  Did what I say _____ offend?  Are we alright?"  I also apologized for far too many things that were not my doing, that were, in fact, other people's assumptions.

That changed at some point early in my adult life.  Mostly, because it just felt yucky but also it generally annoyed the hell out of other people (that much I could tell).  I decided, rather rationally, that other people were adults and they could just tell me if something was wrong.  Besides, humans are crazy-afraid of conflict, and people are not disposed to answering those sorts of prompts honestly.

Given that, about all that can be said for my "What's up?" routine is that the other person can't believe I'm asking an obvious question when what's up is not obvious to me.  And, unbelievably, they still seem to think I ought to be able to read their minds (or bodies or whatever).  I can't.  I deal in words... exactitude.  (Of course, I do misspeak, particularly since becoming disabled with ME/CFS, and I have a propensity to assume, yes assume--I can do that too, but usually they are positive assumptions--, that "most other people," as my psychologist tells me, "are as rational as I am."  And I seem to have misguided confidence in those that like and love me that if my delivery is overly rational or appears off to the person I am speaking with, s/he will give me the benefit of the doubt because the person knows my good heart or will at least ask for clarification.)

This close friend also reminds me that when I give people my gold seal of approval (my mother tells me, "You give away your heart too easily" and the same is true with this seal), I don't use incoming information about people and their interactions to adjust my sense of who the person is.

My general expectation is that people will be honest, honorable, try their best, and check out negative assumptions that they make about me and others, particularly people they care about.  I don't let things stew, I don't sweep things under the rug.  If it can't be let go of, then it must be addressed unless there are special circumstances that hold me back, and then, whatever is holding me back must be held with love as "an assumption" with no negative attribution.  (If something doesn't make sense of me, I back burner it until it does; unfortunately, this is where my Asperger's really gets me, as one and one and one generally don't make three.  I've come to call it my odd box: the place where I store odd occurrences as if one day I'll make sense of them... at least enough sense to be able to articulate to the other person that something is off.)

She's right; I have looked left and not right and I haven't made sense of changing input.

And it has caused me problems... obviously.  Well, actually, it wouldn't be so much of a problem if I didn't expect others to behave as I behave.  To own their own childhood shit and not foist it upon others, foisting them (read me) into family roles or other childhood-scary archetypes I might not even know I am unwittingly playing (even if only in the other person's delusions).  Because of these ways of being, I've gotten massive lumps on the back of my head delivered by people projecting their childhood trauma dramas onto me... usually as they are walking away.

And so being able to think that the sparrow chasing the crow--a new phenomena for me--could have been some horror, was a feat.  A minor feat compared to the realm of human accomplishments, but a feat nevertheless for me.

Of course, I prefer to think that THAT CHASE was not a horror and was relatively harmless and as delightful as I saw it through my rose-colored glasses.

This was longer than I expected, but I suppose you now know something central to who I am and who I am becoming (someone who sees through a wider aperture, one that includes the knowledge that many adults are just older, damaged children).

Life is amazing... you have the opportunity to not only see something new nearly every second, but to learn something new too.