3AM Musings

It has been a couple of weeks since I've written anything. I've had a few things on my mind but haven't sat down and "put pen to paper" yet. In the meantime, I've laid in bed for, I don't even know how long, thinking. Just thinking. Random thoughts, mostly jumbled up since, well it is three o'clock in the morning. What better time to write down a bunch (or few since I'd like to get back to sleep) of things that are on my heart and mind.

Fear of the unknown

Why do things that we don't understand scare us? If we don't know something, we choose to either ignore it or learn from it. Sometimes, all it takes is a conversation, a few simple questions to figure out the unknown. Sometimes, we have to experience it ourselves. I think we are seeing alot of fear of the unknown is today's world, especially this year with a new, unknown virus seemingly running amuck. Also, here in the US fear of the unknown boils over every four years into major political debates in which hardly anyone ever changes their stance. Currently, my fear of the unknown was some strange clicking noise every so often that is probably my reason for being up this early. It was the fan blowing against some papers in my room. Scary stuff....

Was I really trying to solve racial issues at 2 years old (or was I more or less "part of the problem")?

Ok, so for those that don't know I had a pretty major brain operation at around three months old. It was a big deal. I survived... obviously. I wouldn't say I was superhuman or anything, maybe bionic. That doesn't really have anything to do with the story, other than background, but again it's three o'clock in the morning. I am pretty sure the events of this day have not been recorded until now and I was like two years old or younger so details might be a little sketchy. What I remember though is... nothing. I was two. But legend has it, when my parents and I were at the doctors office waiting room at one of my follow up appointments from my surgery, there was a word that I kept saying over and over. Every so often I would look up at a seemingly random person and point at them and say "ballgame." Finally, my dad realized that it wasn't a random occurrence. He figured out after several times of a black person walking by, I would point and say "ballgame" each time that I was referring to them. Where did this come from? Well, I have always been a huge sports fan and it started at a young age when my dad would say to me and my brother something like "let's watch the ballgame." So I heard "ballgame" and correlated it to black people. Most of the time, this referred to watching basketball which, at the time and more so now, was made up of alot of black athletes. So here I was at a very young age and my first experience with people that "don't look like me" was through sports. At two years old, was that what black people represented to me? Athletes. I mean, sure there is a reason why they made a basketball movie called "White Man Can't Jump." Historically, people of color have been more athletic than white people. So it only makes sense as sports fan who was just learning how to talk, much less about how the world worked, would refer to black people as "ballgame." I think, historically, we have also put these same group of people in boxes. Whether the box is a segregated school system, sports league or section of the bus, we have been treating the majority of the minority in ways that no human should be treated. I think that we have made strides in the right direction in the last fifty years or so and even greater strides from the way it was two hundred years ago. But, in light of recent events, it is obvious that we still have a long way to go in repairing these fractured racial issues. Refer to my first point of the fear of the unknown. Sometimes all it takes is a conversation.

Point number two was longer than I thought it would be so maybe I'll just stop here for now. Hoping for no more late night/ early morning "stare at the ceiling" pondering life moments for a while. But just in case, I might tackle more major life questions such as "Why does my dog wake up after I've been laying here for 30 minutes and decide to start hyperventilating and wandering around the room in a panic?" Or maybe "Where does that one sock really go when you put your clothes in the dryer?" Until then, good ni-..... morning!