My great hope for the present is that the temperature will not plunge. Today it was a low of 59 degrees—something we could handle. The new heat pump is scheduled to be installed Wednesday. Until then we feel exposed to the whims of father winter. In a way this is like one’s continued exposure to possible ill health. One is healthy now, but no one knows tomorrow. Lives of peace and contentment can be quickly overthrown. Sometimes it is something of a mid-course correction to be reminded of one’s vulnerabilities. It puts perspective on all good things (and the list seems to be endless) taken for granted. Every year I witness around the world people suffering calamities and feel somehow exempted—like one watching a movie on TV. Sometimes I even feel a little superior and above it all. Such an attitude, I feel deep within, could well jinx my good fortune. There is a deep sense that justice will reign and that my complacency and feelings of superiority will be met by inexorable retribution. Living in Florida, this could well come in a killer hurricane. Then my neighbors and I could be the suffering actors to be seen by millions distantly secure as mere vanishing ghosts on a midweek newscast.
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