You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows

Sitting here on a Friday night with the closing sound of rolling thunder, ominous looking clouds on the horizon, as the storm blows towards me, wondering if one of these wall clouds is going to drop the final curtain down, I study the progress of my mutual fund (steady as always- keep long term in mind) and check my horoscope (five star day, -keep short term in mind). Thus it's an evening of introspection and reflection.

I learned this week, as if there wasn't enough to make one feel insignificant and small, the statistic that there are more people alive today then the total amount of people who have died since the beginning of time. And in approximately eighty years, the size of our current population will double. Talk about the individual being just a small drop in the bucket of primordial substance.

There has been one constant with all those people. When you slide further down the age/time continuum, you begin to feel the need for lessening the shock of the unexpected by trying to anticipate the future. Several of our noblest professions are devoted to predicting how future events might unfold. From stockbroker to weatherperson, from oddsmakers to gypsy fortune tellers and horoscope writers, there are many here among us who earn their livings off reassuring the rest of us on how things will be.

As you pass through more and more days, the gift of intuition tends to replace any desire for a greater imagination. Values change and any wish one might have held for spontaneity takes a back seat to the peace of mind of routine and knowing what comes next. Some people look up at the sky and see cumulonimbus wall and funnel clouds, others look up and see cats and clowns.

Skeptics might observe that the ironic part of all these future seers and experts is that the "legitimate" ones, the stockbrokers, the meteorologists are right about as often as the fortune telling, horoscopic, crystal ball reading, palm readers. Somehow the fancy suits with their formulaic models and the scientists with their Doppler radar give us comfort with their technology and education while most of us take the words of the spiritual with a grain of salt. Yet what was the last lucrative stock tip you got? When was the last time you heard an accurate weather forecast? I read my horoscope every morning. It tends to hit the mark more often than the chance we are told of precipitation that day. So with one eye currently gazing at the spinning clouds coming my way, and the other eye reading my day's horoscope telling me I'm having an excellent day, and with one ear listening to the serious, glum doomsayers telling me to take cover in my closet, and the other ear trying to hear the score of the Twins game, I continue to type away.

Yes there is some boredom in waking up every morning at 5 a.m., using my morning coffee as a replacement for sleep, working my ten hour days and coming home to a microwaved meal. Seems to me in another age I used to be a tad less predictable, but the paychecks are steady, and the mood swings are less drastic. The old eccentricities haven't exactly disappeared, they have changed themselves into different forms. In a year where the externals are wild and drastic, the internals have balanced out and become a source of comfort. There may be another lesson to learn if the roof over my head flies off into the sunset, but for right now I guess the only thing I can think of is that reassurance only goes a little ways. Ultimately it is the self, the little voice inside the individual that must guide the way into the future, and try to make sense of what happened in the past. The radar may have more visible technology than the crystal ball, but in the end it's that stuff inside the person that must decide what the hell all this is about.