I almost forgot about Groundhog Day this year.
Good thing I'm on social media -- I had memes to remind me. Of course, one of them had the image of a screaming groundhog against a fiery background with the caption "Punxsutawney Phil sees The Future: Too traumatized to return to his burrow."
It was pretty funny...
I ALWAYS think it's important to be able to laugh about things. Even if it's "wrong" or dark, though I have enough sense hold that inside out of politeness when I need to. Most of the time.
You ever feel like you're in a "holding pattern?"
In the air traffic control sense, it's when there's no open runway for a plane to land. The plane can't park itself in the sky, so its holding pattern is to fly around above the airport until there's room. I got stuck circling on a flight like that for a few hours once, in San Francisco. It was drag.
More metaphorically, being in a holding pattern seems different from just getting stuck or being in a rut. Not quite as negative or depressive, it's "suspended progress." Maybe an extreme example of that would be something more like the Groundhog Day movie?
I get that sort of feeling about the future a lot lately, on a personal level and then more broadly when I talk to other people or scroll through the news.
The future's never truly predictable, but there's a way of things that seems to work, and becomes routine, and keeps on working well enough. Until it doesn't.
And maybe you see that coming but it's not clear what to do about it, so you keep doing what you've been doing, with some background tension creeping up as a heightened alertness.
Maybe it's just me. I don't know what to do but pay attention, be willing to adapt when necessary and hope for the best.
I came across a quote that I copied down from somewhere: "Reality is shy. It only reveals itself to those who do not wish it to be something else." That fits in here somewhere, I think.
Anyway, the groundhog saw its shadow this time around, so we've still got another six weeks of winter...