Mother Nature & Fate

Today turned out to be the first weekday in easily two months when the neighboring building wasn’t having construction done, and thus the unfamiliar relative quiet naturally made the rest of the world seem that much louder, all the more so because the world kept announcing itself with harsh gusts of wind and passing emergency vehicles, their sirens turned up to 11, so not merely the distant foghorns and muffled pedestrian chatter that are the usual hallmarks — if not quite soundmarks — of the neighborhood. And the sounds on my mind weren’t merely in the present tense. Building work like this seemed unlikely, from the start, to be that of an existing tenant, and lo and behold, new tenants are expected, and with them almost certainly new sounds following new daily rhythms. Perhaps the world was extra loud today to prepare me, to lower the likelihood of whatever new sounds are soon to arrive being experienced as especially intrusive. In other words, Mother Nature and Fate can already be depended upon to keep things interesting.