Shona

Explore

There is always more to explore.

You can look out.

You can go out.

You can look in.

You can go in.

Look up, or down.

But if it’s exploring, you have to see things in a new light, even if the things you are seeing are not new, or even new to you.

Every day, our experience reinforces some characteristics of who we think we are, and also offers us the chance to change.

I like to explore insects that I find lying around dead, using my microscopes.

Insects have fascinating structures. Here is a series of scanning electron microscope photos of a bee head, zoomed in to see the ball joint that lets the bee control the position of its antenna.

Note the varying length of the hairs. Those that would cause interference otherwise are shorter!

This last image was obtained at 500x original magnification. Note the 100 micron scale in the upper right. That is 0.1 mm.

When you are looking at something at even 50x, there’s a lot to see! You have to learn to see what’s interesting.

Daily Prompt: Explore

This American Life, a radio magazine, broadcast an older show (Episode 289) from their archives about adult children confronting their parents with their sins, oversights, weaknesses, etc. The moderator noted that often the offspring find that they can bring expression of sorrow or remorse, but not explanation.

Struggling with my offsprings’ accusations, I see that there is not a total lack of foundation for criticism, but the new generation is judging by the standards of the new generation, which in part were brought about by the values the old generation espoused and worked for.

There is usually no practical manner to bridge the gap.

But this begs the question of what exactly is a value. We don’t often realize that we hold something as a value only when we feel it is insufficiently present in the world. Although I suppose conservatives believe that the things they value have been established fact for generations, if not millennia.

But there are always underlying conditions that work to make living in the valued way a challenge.

If that weren’t true, we wouldn’t think about it as a value, as something valued.

Values remain values until the world changes, and then they become the new baseline.

For example, most human beings in Western culture think slavery is wrong. Most of us who have learned about new forms of slavery have been appalled. We had thought that battle had already been won.

Anyway, my past failures can never be made up for. I am toxic until and unless I am able to weave a new life, always under the anxiety of a new release of the poison.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/toxic/