https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/where-the-covers-deep
Advice can have this aspect of power over/ bossy pants if it is not carefully doled out especially if nobody has asked for it.
Sometimes mature interaction can involve going into a situation that’s maybe already emotionally sideways and touchy to say, “why not try it this other way”. You might get bit. You have to be brave and do the best you can.
You can show someone you respect them and offer council as an equal.
I used to say, “I ain’t tryna be your boss,” as a lead in to an untried method.
People get the idea that they need to go out there and take charge, or that someone has to. The notion of leadership has this high place.
I find the people and ideas and inspirations for the solutions to what we observe as problems are often something we barely noticed, someone who knew where we were headed and planted a seed, someone who guided your hand in the moment where you needed it and let you learn how it should happen without needing to be recognized, or a dog.
Someone who stands in front of a room full of strangers spouting advice and telling you what your future holds isn’t doing leadership. That’s called theater.
It’s rare that something like winter shows up unannounced. The leaves on the trees change color and fall off. The wind has a hint in it. The sun stays lower and doesn’t stay out as long and even a legitimately warm day’ll get cool enough at night to trigger the furnace by dawn.
When the wind blows, when the night falls, if a rain comes in it carries the message that winter is coming. You’re no longer sure you should stay out in it the way you are in summer. It feels like a warning. You might not be properly attired.
Winter is coming, it all says.
I hold that anyone intent on unironically laying out your future for you is after your money, and winter is no exception.
Even if you are dead broke you can open a window in the summertime and let in the cool night air. If you can’t keep a fire going when it’s ten below, your life is in peril. The people who lived in the Midwest before civilization zhuzhed it all up had the good sense to get on a river and head south when she started hinting at inhospitable.
Once the trees were cleared and the conduits of modernity had been drawn between will-labor-for-realm-coins and dig- it-up-and-light-it-on-fire there was no longer any reason to pull up stakes. The days getting shorter doesn’t have a notable effect on being able to make ends meet.
There are things you can depend on in all of this and one is that it will get better. You might have to work on it. Nothing is always easy, but it goes up and down or the cycle feels like that as you go through it, like a roller coaster more often that like the inside of a clothes dryer. There’s a tunnel. Then you are out in the sun again. And you only get to the next part if you keep on. It’s maybe too bad that you can’t feel yourself changing the world, but you are. With every breath you are making the atmosphere. With every step you are moving parts of the world and things alive that you will never see that have been born and will live out lives and breed and die and winter is just the part where it slows down and the details get buried until spring. And there will be spring. But it’s part of a cycle, so it’s not exactly the future. It’s the thing it did before, again. It’s the light returning. It’s part of forever all the way out like it was all the way back.
