New day

Have you ever heard the phrase, "like a duck in a new day"? Well, most times that phrase describes me perfectly. Each morning I wake up and find myself facing the world as if I had never encountered it before. Sleep erases the previous day and its concerns. Worry is fruitless because tomorrow never turns out the way I expect it will. Whatever might be painful or might affect me negatively will be gone tomorrow, or very soon after.

One alarming aspect of this tendency (at least to me) is that the population of my reality can also come and go, and I don't even miss them too much when they're gone. Facebook has somewhat mitigated this, though, since every day I can "see" people who rarely physically cross my path and enter the actual scene of my day. They continue to populate the show of my life, since their doings are posted on their walls and come across my newsfeed. I continue to care because I am in this small way connected to them. But if Facebook were to go down tomorrow and never come back again, I very well might not miss any but those who currently populate my world. That can't be good, can it?

I've often wondered what inner workings cause a person to care about things and people they don't personally encounter. I remember a conversation I had with Joel once about some a famous athlete who had passed away. (At least I think it was an athlete. I've slept since then and don't really remember!) He was somewhat devastated and I simply could not understand why. We didn't know this person. We had no connection with him. As far as I remember, I couldn't recall Joel ever even mentioning this person. How could Joel care so much to the point of being almost depressed because he had died? Even more intriguing to me was why I didn't care.

I watched an interesting demonstration video in a child development class I took a million years ago. A small baby was shown an object and then given the object to handle. The baby was engaged with the object and very interested in it, but once it was taken away, the baby did not seem to notice that it was gone. An older child was also shown an object and was allowed to interact with the object. When the object was removed, the older child began to search for it, convinced that it had to be somewhere. Explanation was made that as children mature, they begin to conceive of objects outside of themselves as having permanence. This is what makes the game of "Peek-a-boo" so much fun for children this age, but not for younger children.

So, here we are in a new year. Will I continue with the old pattern of allowing people to flow through my life? Or, will I decide to hold onto relationship and allow myself to form lasting and permanent bonds with the people in my life? I hope it is the latter.