Tale One: Driving along the curvy road from San Marcos to Wimberley, I stepped on the brakes as a young man was running down the side of the road toward me. I could see a car stopped ahead and another person emerging. Oh my, thought I, surely there’s not a wreck. As I got closer to the man, he bent over to exam something near the pavement – a great big turtle, lumbering toward the road. He quickly turned it around and got it back away from its impending doom. I chuckled and drove on thinking of other times I’ve seen people jump out of their cars to help turtles. I wondered if these folks would do the same for a person wandering on to the road.

Tale Two: My mother is a hummer. At times, this can be annoying since she hums almost all the time without realizing it. She can even hum while she eats. (I’m glad she hums in tune.) When I was at the nursing home the day of the turtle, Mother was humming that old hymn, Help Somebody Today. She stopped midhum and said, “I wonder why I keep humming this” and then she went right on.

Tale Three: The same day of the hummer and the turtle, I went to the grocery store, which is one of my least favorite chores. Grumpy and tired, I entered the baking isle, noting a young woman, studying the spices. She looked up and when I made eye contact, she asked if I knew which chili powder was the best. “You see,” she said, “I’m trying to make chili for the very first time and my husband doesn’t think I can do it.” I helped her pick out the chili powder and asked if she had a few other things. She took out her recipe and we went over it as I made suggestions and explained that the long green pepper she had couldn’t be substituted for a regular green pepper unless you broiled the skin off first. (She was sure she didn’t want to do that.) Finally, since she still looked worried, I gave her my business card and told her to call me if she got into trouble. She thanked me saying that her mother doesn’t cook.

Synopsis: At home, after the above three episodes, I realized how they all fit together and I felt good about the day. Mother is still teaching me; one turtle has been saved to race the hare another day, and a young wife, hopefully, has made chili. The message is clear, you never know when you will have a chance to save a turtle. I’m going to seize the opportunity no matter how small it seems.

With the cattle sale four weeks from today, you might imagine that stress is predominant here at the ranch. It’s a good stress, I think, because we get to hear from and see customers that we enjoy and appreciate.

I glanced at a magazine today that, as if on call, contained an article about ways to reduce stress. I think that I’ve read so many of these from time to time that I could probably write one of my own. There are, of course, the obvious stress reducers such as eating right, exercising, focusing on breathing, meditating, etc. This particular article, however, discussed how clutter can reduce your energy creating stress. Finally, something I can actually do! First, I suggested to my husband that HIS clutter was adding to MY stress. Well, that didn’t fly at all! Then, realizing that the only thing I could actually control was my own clutter, I dove right in and started cleaning the studio.

As a good researcher, I know that you are supposed to document the condition of what you are trying to change prior to starting the treatment. Yet, I failed to take a picture of the cluttered studio prior to the “treatment” of dust and clutter removal. You’ll just have to take my word for it. The studio was dirty and very cluttered! Following a two hour treatment, two thirds of it has improved as shown in the picture. What you cannot see is the bead table stacked with plastic drawers and other materials. That is on tap for “treatment” tomorrow. I do seem to feel a bit less stressed as I look around the room (as long as I don’t turn my head too far towards the beads). Maybe there IS something to this method. I suspect, however, that it will be short lived unless I can manage to keep things straight; but for the moment, I’ll take what I can get.

I made a grown man cry today. Perhaps I should feel bad about it, but I don’t.

Today, I visited my mother at the “center” which is her word for the nursing home. I do not know if she has a psychological dislike of the later term, but center is what we have called her home for six years. One of the churches donated a nice reasonably new spinet organ to the center and I’ve tried for months to get mother to play it. It has been somewhat of a source of consternation for me since it took a considerable number of “lessons” from me, which she is sure she didn’t ask for, in order to get her reasonably adept at the sound settings. Finally, with that task checked off and a small bag of music that she could manage with her wheel chair prepared for her, I felt reasonably secure knowing she would enjoy playing the organ on a regular basis. WRONG! Days later, she told me there was too much going on in the living room where the organ is located and that she couldn’t bother folks. My mother is a great musician and I feel sure people would love her playing. I finally learned from my probing questions that even one person in the room is too many for her to play. Luckily, my son suggested I get earphones so that Mother could play the organ without anyone hearing her. We practiced the plugging in and removal process for the headphones and I felt she was on her way. WRONG! Days later I discovered she still wasn’t playing. It was then that I learned that not only did she not want anyone to hear her, she also didn’t want anyone to see her playing. My terse response to this was to explain that I didn’t have a shroud to make her invisible and she explained that she didn’t need a shroud because she wasn’t dead.

For some unknown reason, when I approached the organ playing today, Mother was amenable and although she used the earphones, she didn’t worry about being seen. She did, however, lean over to me several times while she was playing to ask if I could hear her. I explained that all the sound went to the earphones when she plugged them in. “Well,” she said, “you didn’t tell me that part!” I tried not to make a face.

After Mother finished playing, she agreed to let me play without the earphones. After a while, a man rolled up behind me and I could hear him talking about his daughter who plays the pipe organ. He explained that he was a preacher and she had been his organist. I quickly changed from the tunes I was playing to hymns and then I heard the therapist with the man say, “please don’t cry.” This 92 year old said, “it’s just so beautiful.” It was all I could do to keep playing. After several hymns, he asked if I could find a peppy one, which I did, and he and my mother commenced to sing along. Every once in a while he would shout out “halleluiah!” and I would pretend I was used to this response. We closed this impromptu concert with The Old Grey Mare (yes, I know that isn’t a hymn) and everyone in the room sang along. I promised the man that we would come look for him the next time we played the organ and he and my mother both assured me that neither of them was going any place.

So, I DID make a grown man cry today and I hope I can do it again. The blessings of an elderly preacher stimulated by strains of Amazing Grace brought joy to all of us at the center.

Have you ever listened to a lecture or sermon and wondered how in the world the speaker knew just exactly what was going on in your life? The message seemed directed right at you. I wonder if others in the audience felt the same way, but for very different reasons. Thinking humans have a way of sorting messages into our current context and applying them to our personal issues. This sometimes leads to an apparent apathy about our situation when we try to tell someone about an experienced hardship and the listener turns it into their own story. The listener probably isn’t really uncaring about our situation, but simply views it through their own contextual lenses.

Once in a while, we go out for dinner and I am intent on NOT discussing business. Yet, it seems we can’t quite leave all those cattle at home and I just can’t help but notice the jewelry folks have on. No matter how we try, our lenses are colored by the context of our daily existence. For example, while driving through town the other day, I noticed a big sign in a store window. It read “Rock Stars Wanted.” I almost pulled right over assuming that they needed jewelry designers who work with “rocks”. A second look, however, straightened out my thinking. The new bar on the square wanted bands to play at happy hour. Hmm . . . I guess that isn’t me.

Recently, my daughter found a pattern for a toy ball that used different types of textured ribbons. My daughter thought it would be great to make for her 8 month old and I, of course, wondered how to convert those marvelous textures to metal work. (Shame on me!)

I believe that contextual thinking is good for creativity. Man has traditionally borrowed ideas from seemingly unrelated sources for problem solving. The entire body of work in Synectics (purposeful connection making) is based on this principle. We might still be riding on bumpy metal tires were it not for a man making a connection between his son’s situation of riding his bike with metal tires on bumpy cobblestone streets and the garden hose he was using. The literature indicates that the first rubber tires came from a garden hose wrapped around the metal tire rim of a bike. Putting things in our own context can make for improvement.

The point here is that contextual thinking can work for us. We do it all the time and find connections to use in problem solving and design work. Let’s just remember that some connection just DO NOT work. I wonder what that bar owner would have thought if I’d brought my designs in and applied for his Rock Star position.