When you’re kind of a number nut, you enjoy things like today’s date 1/11/11, or when your odometer hits landmark combinations (or makes poker hands). I remember back in Dec. 1987 thinking women getting pregnant this month have a shot at giving birth 8/8/88. Then go figure, who gets born on 8/8/88? Princess Fergie’s daughter. A princess and she gets the coolest birth date. Hope she feels gratitude for being such a lucky duck! Attention out there: Want to give birth on 11/11/11? Then we know what you’ll be doing next month!
My brother once bought a frozen turkey not because he wanted a turkey but because its weight was 12.34 lbs.. He figured how could he pass that by.
This obsession with noticing numbers was taught to us early. Our dad would calculate the distance a trip would take, then divide the mileage so that as we drove he could announce, “Just passing 1/6 of the trip done.”
Years later, as an adult, I asked my dad to figure out the odds for various poker hands if one played with m&m’s. Of course you can’t make all the hands since all you have to work with is colors. But you can imagine a full house, say 3 red and 2 green. It ends up that the worst hand in regular poker is one of the best in m&m’s poker. The “nothing” hand, that is no pairs just 5 m&m’s all of a different color, actually beats the m&m’s full house! There’s a lesson there, something that looks like nothing is usually something.
Noticing numbers, enjoying the light, hearing puns in normal conversation, closing your eyes to enhance the flavor of something delicious, hovering over the toaster to enjoy the heat and the smells, really getting into scratching a mosquito bite, lingering over the sensual feeling of the bar of soap on your face, getting a good laugh at the comical freeze frame when you pause the VCR, brushing your teeth because it really does feel awfully good if you bother to pay attention and notice . . .
Decide to notice! Life is really pretty darned great.
Ruth
Smile. Be Happy.