Second Chances and Double Takes
"Wherever we go, we are friends" -Sloth and Manatee
There's a little gift at the end of this post
Do you come up with pithy things to say that would surely have amazed everyone or convinced someone of something? Except that you thought of it an hour, or a day, or years, later?
Some Moon rocks attempted to say hi to Sloth and Manatee (who also had Tardigrades and a Penguin with a jet pack in tow at the time) but the rocks kind of missed their chance. That original sequence is here. But hey, what's this?
Second chances are different from second thoughts. Second thoughts are where you actually did do something, but now you're thinking, "Why?"
Ideas that could have definitely used some second thoughts but it's awfully far after the fact now:
Where do you put thoughts? Do you write them down? Do you type them? Perhaps you have had the chance to type on a typewriter.
Sloth and Manatee do a double-take quite a lot in relation to things that they say to each other:
I am trying to give a second chance to a small tree in my back yard right now. It got really stressed because it rained a lot and it got waterlogged and is generally not doing great. But it is still trying to be a tree, and so I got it some soil and pruned it and I'm hoping that like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree it will rebound.
Do you think that the Internet age has made us less able to have second chances? Like making a mistake now is a one-time thing, and there are no do-overs? What is life without do-overs? Or mistakes? As Dr. Ken Robinson said, "What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original."
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin says: "The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."
Here's to unpredictable messes that yield some sort of something.
And finally, here is a gift below. You can download and print this out and scribble on it (printable version is waaay down at the bottom of this email). It is for making stuff up. Can you write a two-sentence story from it? Can you create a character? What do you think of? Does it bring up a memory? See what happens! It is good sometimes not knowing what is going to happen.
Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.
May you try something, may you try again, may you make up some stuff, won't you be my neighbor? -Betsy
HELLO AND THANKS FOR READING!!
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