13: Lucky Break
1. “The usefulness of a cup is its emptiness.” Bruce Lee
2. I might finish a crossword puzzle if a lucky break outweights the urge for giving up, and if I can resist looking up the answers in the back of the book.
3. Carl Jung viewed “luck” not as random chance, but as synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence. His exploration of synchronicity ultimately leads to the profound idea of a unified reality the unus mundas, a Latin term meaning “one world” that refers to a primordial, unified reality from which all existence stems, transcending divisions of matter and spirit.
4. The Big Debbies really broke it down at Dogtown. Listen HERE.
5. And HERE is Seph Custer entertaining us at the Dogtown Thanksgiving Potluck. Story coming soon.
6. A miss or a mess?
7. Atom or Adam?
8. Is the moon half full or half empty?
9. “So how can you get the most out of a glass-half-empty mind-set? Decades of research have found that positive thinking isn’t always so positive. In some cases, pessimists fare better than those with a sunnier disposition. Studies have found that by setting low expectations and envisioning worst-case scenarios, defensive pessimists optimized their performance on a variety of tasks, from darts and math problems to fulfilling real-life goals. Optimism can also beget disappointment. In one study, psychology students were surveyed immediately before and after receiving exam results. Students who had anticipated a higher grade than they received were upset after learning their score; students who had underestimated their grade (i.e., the pessimists) felt better afterward…” – From The Power of Negative Thinking/ The Atlantic
10. My potter son Josh made this pot and gifted it to his brother Dylan, who agreed to let me bring it home to Massachusetts for my brother John’s ashes after he died in early September, but the ashes weren’t ready when I was there. Today, some of John’s ashes are now in the pot and kept at my brother Joey’s house. Joey and John were inseperable when they were kids.
11. I’ll be a muse in the afterlife / I’ll live on the internet / You can look me up / and read all about it / I’ll leave cameos / on YouTube videos / I’ll leave traces on searches / and poems on the cloud – Colleen
12. Jung held long conversations with Albert Einstein about the possible connection between paranormal synchronicity and the theory of relativity, as well as quantum mechanics. Jung believed that his thoughts about synchronicity proved the existence of the collective unconscious… The collective unconscious is a theory by Carl Jung proposing that all humans share a common, inherited layer of the unconscious mind, which contains universal patterns of thought and instinct called archetypes.
13. It’s never too late to know a groove from a rut, to wear your heart on your sleeve and let it break.
___________Thirteen Thursday
December 3rd, 2025 5:17 pm
#8: I’d assume half empty if the moon is waning and half full if the moon is waxing.
#9: I’m all for positivity, but there is such a thing as toxic positivity. Just as with anything, one can have too much of a “good” thing.
December 4th, 2025 12:30 pm
#9 is interesting. I think I fall somewhere in between on the optimist-pessimist spectrum, although I frequently drift to the optimist side. Most recently, after my open-heart surgery in October, I felt like I needed a end date goal. I figured I’d be healed, my incision anyway, by Thanksgiving, what I thought was reasonable. Nope. At least another six weeks to go. The letdown was brutal. A little more pessimism would have been less hard on the soul!!
December 4th, 2025 7:20 pm
I think I’m an optomistic pessimist.
December 4th, 2025 8:23 pm
Jung had a lot of interesting thoughts. You mentioned last week that we were both probably INTJ in the Myers Briggs. I originally tested as INTP but it was only like 2 points over 0. Now when I take that test, sometimes I test INTJ, but it’s like 2 points in the other direction. The person who initially gave me the test said the “J” was my shadow and would be a problem for me as I aged. She was right.
December 5th, 2025 12:31 am
I wasn’t sure whether I was J or P either until I learned that J bascially means you like to have a plan or come away from something such as a meeting with something concrete rather than open ended and planning as you go along like a P.