I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I am. In a lot of ways. It seems like something inevitable is coming for this whole big world. For one thing, the “restrictions” around the virus are ending too soon. But I know people are needing money, needing to get back to work.
But the inevitable will come. A second wave of the virus will roust about, which will kill just as many, and put the same kind of stress on our medical care workers. It will be equally as sad. The virus hasn’t gone anywhere, and until we find a vaccine or the cure, we will all be at high risk.
Truly though, I didn’t mean to write about COVID-19.
I was going to write about the shoe. It made me wonder how the phrase ever got started. As it turns out, this one came about during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the tenements of New York City. All those apartments lining all those streets. And within them, the bedrooms were built one on top of another. So when you were laying sound and snug in your little bed, it was common to hear your upstairs neighbor take off a shoe and drop it. And then a few seconds later, you would hear the same thing with the other shoe. It became shorthand for waiting for something you knew was coming.
That is, of course, unless you lived downstairs from a one-legged pirate.
Waiting for the other shoe to drop, we are.
Or perhaps, we are skating on thin ice. Either way, the inevitable will come around.
That’s quite a word when you come to think of it. Inevitable.
in·ev·i·ta·ble | inˈevidəb(ə)l |
/adjective
certain to happen; unavoidable
• informal – so frequently experienced or seen that it is completely predictable
/noun (the inevitable)
a situation that is unavoidable
Yet. In this world, where nothing is certain, nothing is for sure, it should be hard to use such a word. But there are high probabilities everywhere.
If I walk over to the wall and flip on the switch, the light will come on. It is inevitable. We can be sure of it. Almost. Any number of things could go wrong in that second. A power outage. A mouse chewing through a wire. The lightbulb burning out. But all in all, you don’t have to wait long for the other shoe to drop once you flip the switch.
Or if we drop a lead ball from our hand. It is a pretty good bet that gravity will do its little Cha-cha-cha. The ball will fall, in a direct line from our hand to the ground. A million times in a row. Unless of course a huge gale force of wind blows through the wall at that very second and blows the ball to Timbuktu. Which is a small city in Mali. North of the Niger River. In Africa.
And that would be quite a thing. No shoe dropping there.
Truly what all this points to, is what we already know.
Life is a process of learning. When we start out, we know very little. As we go along, we can choose to be students in this life. Observing, noticing, discovering. With each day, we can broaden our awareness, in any number of directions. We can learn and grow.
Some people are much better at this than others.
When we see the world with educated eyes, we move through life with a certain understanding of things, as well as the realization that there is much more to learn. But we make sound estimations. Educated guesses. We can identify high probabilities and likelihoods. We often are the ones who know that another shoe is bound to drop.
We see the thin ice, and we try our best to avoid it.
And when others start skating along, we try to tell them where the thin ice is.
There is the big part. As we go along, we find that every human is both student and teacher. And that is all a part of our path here. To both learn, and to teach.
And we try to do our best in both.
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“It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”
― Albert Einstein
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“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin
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“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire
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