Monthly Archives: March 2025

Mar 19, 2025 – Self- & Other-Care and Being Made Aware

I’ve left off – just as I thought might happen – writing, but not thinking, about those things I notice that I take for granted. There are so many such things that sometimes I am stymied by the amount or, as I noted opening this note, I am unable to pick a starting point, a way ‘in’ to the thing taken for granted I want to write about.

I mean … I could go for the big one: that I live in a democratic republic (or is it a republican democracy?). But that would really stop me in my tracks, both because there is so much to say about it and because I would not know where to start.

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket posted to Bluesky an OpEd this morning about what he called “The Sharks Circling the Boat” [https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/the-sharks-circling-the-boat/]. And that post aligned nicely with one by Jennifer Mercieca on The Conversation about “Donald Trump’s nonstop news-making can be exhausting, making it harder for people to scrutinize his presidential actions” [https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-nonstop-news-making-can-be-exhausting-making-it-harder-for-people-to-scrutinize-his-presidential-actions-250733?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=bylineblueskybutton].

All of that said … “I take for granted …” that at 73 we are still able to care for ourselves (though, we are not the best housekeepers). That is, we are still able to bathe, dress, prepare food, eat, and so many other things that make a life AND we are able to do them for ourselves, by ourselves.

I originally said it half seriously/half jokingly to the PA at our doctor’s office but that does not make it any less accurate in terms of this thing I take for granted: “I am still able to stand on one leg and pull on my pants, one leg at a time. And so long as I am able to do that I figure I’m okay.” But, there are mornings when it is easier (meaning less painful) to just sit on the edge of the bed and pull them on … slowly. Thankfully, those days are few but not always far between, depending on how much physical work I did the day(s) before.

It was while I was on a walk this morning (Jeeezus! It was cold out there this morning walking INTO the wind; and it seemed as though the wind was coming from every direction …) that this topic suggested itself to me, in part because being able to get out for a walk falls under this topic but, in a more immediate ‘sense’, I was ‘made aware’ of my taking for granted my ability to go for a longish walk unaided (or, for that matter, the ability to get up at 0530 today and bake off two loaves of sourdough bread): I was passed (twice!) by the City’s Meals-on-Wheels truck; the serivce is offered under their ‘Seniors Programs’, which are quite comprehensive.

‘Being made aware’, presuming of course that one is open to being made aware, is one of the methods by which we come to question – and, ideally – better appreciate those things we routinely take for granted. A chance encounter with something that or someone who calls our complacency into question is one of the most effective means of being made aware: it occurs independent of us, it intrudes on our ‘usual’ thoughts and acts, and it can force a reassessment if we are open to it (as, for example, I am through having decided to think and write about things I take for granted).

Mar 16, 2025 – A Complete Blank Today … except …

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For lack of sleep, I rarely gave this notion a passing thought today. But, it strikes me that I can take an example from what we did this morning, and what was reinforced by a ‘memory post’ from 5 years ago made by Marc MacPherson: “I take for granted …” that, when I go to the grocery store to shop for specific items (today it was eggs, honey, coffee, and other things) I will find them, without difficulty.

Mar 15, 2025 – Electricity and Readiness-to-Hand

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“I take for granted …” that, as I step out of our bedroom into the dark living room and then into the kitchen, each light switch or lamp chain or knob when flipped, pulled, or turned will bring light; that when I adjust the thermostat to warm the house the furnace will turn on and blow warm air into the house; that the security system will turn on or off, as I wish, when I tell it to do so. All of these things are contingent on the availability of electricity – along with a variety of other integrated and integrating support systems.

Such ‘switch’ manipulations are done unconsciously with a barely acknowledged ‘expectation’ that the desired result will occur. As occurred just now after I looked up and noted the house thermostat indicating a lower than expected temperature (until I realized it was pre-programmed, by me, to return to 70° at a particular time … I even made a sort of mental note after adjusting the ‘heat’ as I left the bedroom that I’d have to reset it after 0600); I opened the App that controls the thermostat from my iPhone and raised it to 73° (two degrees above the current temperature so,as to force the heat to come on), without having to leave the sofa.

Things ALL taken for granted.

Can we consider these ‘things taken for granted’ – and, here, ‘things’ are not necessarily just objects but can include processes – as sites of a potential tension between ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit)? That is, so long as ‘things taken for granted’ function as expected, yielding the expected results, they remain ready-to-hand for use by us, not unlike the hammer of Heidegger. And, it is only when we acknowledge that ‘things taken for granted’ are indeed taken for granted and could ‘fail’ our expectations, or the failure actually occurs – like the heat and lights for the house not responding to my ‘commands’, that we experience those things as present-at-hand, that is, we wonder at and about them and their relation to us.

When ‘things taken for granted’ fail us – as many of them eventually will, if only temporarily – we are forced to re-examine our ‘relationship’ with those things.

We’ve had situations where the electricity ‘failed’ us. But it never failed for long (minutes to hours rather than days); and, it did eventually come back, much to our relief and comfort. A good stockpile of flashlights and sweaters, jackets, and blankets can mitigate an extended loss. Our gas fireplace works on a principle of thermoconductivity through its gas pilot such that it will continue to work despite a power failure throughout the house. We also have the beginnings of some sort of electrical independence: solar panels on the roof. But, to achieve full independence from the electrical grid, we still have to buy and have installed a battery system to provide power when the grid fails. Perhaps a small power source or generator is something we should consider, something to keep the iPhones charged, to power the refrigerator and freezer (so we do not lose the food we’ve set aside).

Mar 14, 2025 – Opening Thoughts on Things Taken for Granted

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This note-able topic is the outgrowth of some ‘shower thoughts’, yesterday. But it is also very much related to our present political situation.

I had been toying with the notion of a diary-of-sorts, something of our time under Trump 2.0. The idea of a diary came from my reading of Victor Klemperer, specifically the introduction to his Language of the Third Reich. And that, working back, came from reading Timothy Snyder’s little book, On Tyranny.

But, the problem I keep running into with diaries is that, lacking a focal point on which to turn my thoughts and attention, I am dreadful about keeping them going. I seem to have no trouble starting; I just ‘lose interest’ … though that is not entirely accurate. Focus is a function not only of ‘interest’ but of time. And, well, time … how easily is that disrupted, breaking focus and damping interest?

And that is where, more or less while indulging in ‘shower thoughts’, I stumbled on the notion of things taken for granted. How hard would it be to keep a diary going thinking about and then meditating on things one routinely takes for granted? And we take a lot for granted … if nothing else this could also be an exercise in self- and other-awareness.

Example: “I take for granted …” the ‘fact’ that when I open a tap in/on the house, water will flow. Not just water but, rather, water that is clean, safe – in a word: potable. That water is assumed to always be ‘there’ ready to flow from the faucet so that I can then drink it, clean our dishes and clothes, clean my body, prepare our food, water our garden. I also know –albeit in a ‘first world’ sort of way – how discomfiting it can be to turn the knob or lift the ‘handle’ and unexpectedly have nothing come from the faucet … nothing, except maybe the sound of air moving in the piping.

From where does this taking ‘water’ for granted come? And, what can I do to disrupt the complacency behind such thought-less thinking? What can I do to make present the precarity of uninterrupted access to water?

The nature of things taken for granted seems to me to be their (sorry, Heidegger …) readiness-to-hand or Zuhandenheit, their ubiquity, their duration/durability, the ‘fact’ that we have never – or rarely ever – been without.

Reading Frank Herbert’s DUNE was an early wake-up call; subsequent readings have helped reinforce awareness. Living in the desert southwest – both as a child in the mountains around Los Alamos and now at the northern edge of the great Chihuahuan Desert – also helps with awareness. Metered water supplies, monthly water and sewage bills based on realtime use, the ability to log on to the City website and ‘see’ one’s water use in real time all contribute to water awareness.

So, each day – not necessarily at a specific time but, rather, as the time finds me or I find it – I will endeavor to identify and question (interrogate?) something I take for granted.

Waking from One Nightmare into Another

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Coming back to The Perennial Student after so many years of not adding to it (despite it being on my browser home tabs page), it dawns on me that the last time I really engaged with the blog was FIVE years ago. At that time, I had been home only a couple of months after having traveled to New Orleans for an academic conference: the 2020 Conference for the International Society for the Study of Narrative (https://www.thenarrativesociety.org). At that time, we were only just learning about the extent of the COVID pandemic; in fact, I am not sure the word ‘pandemic’ had yet been used to describe it. But it was clear, while traveling through New Orleans, Houston, and El Paso to get home to Las Cruces, that something terrible was happening. And it was also abundantly clear that we were living in a political nightmare: Trump was POTUS and he was mismanaging the spread of a highly contagious and deadly respiratory disease. The airports I passed through getting home were eventually identified as ‘hot spots’ for the spread of the disease. I was lucky … I neither caught it nor brought it home with me.

At the time I made the post about the conference, we were in a form of social lockdown designed to prevent the spread of the disease.

Now, in 2025, we are once again dealing with a Trump ‘presidency’ … a whole new nightmare, about which I might write some other day. This is important because when – it is not a question of ‘if’ or ‘whether’ – the next pandemic strikes (could it be measles, as with the cases at the border area among New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico?) we will be dealing not only with a ‘president’ who routinely deals in dis-/mis-information, we will also be dealing with Robert F. Kennedy , Jr., as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I believe that is all that need be said. His name is synonymous with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

So, as I said in the title of this post, we have awakened from one nightmare (Trump 1.0), and after a four year period of relative sanity and recovery, find ourselves back in the nightmare (Trump 2.0).

This post serves as an introduction to yet another attempt to re-awaken this blog and use it to think through things that catch my attention.

One of those things, only just noted, is that I misspelled ‘perennial’ in my domain name. Thankfully, I spelled it correctly in the site ‘name’. What was I thinking?!? Or, was this a compromise because the domain name I wanted, spelled correctly, was already taken? That sounds like a good cover story …