Different bubbles, same hot tub...

Lately it's been the differences that stand out.

With the weather changing, the warm short-sleeved days vs. the frost-on-the-windshield sweatshirt days.

It's the differences in the personalities and ages of our girls.

Mornings, it's the physicality of a running or gym morning vs. the mind-heart connection of a kicked-back, cross-legged writing morning.

As a morning run moves on it's the pace and grace of the fast bastard Rise Up Runners vs. the slug-it-out strides of the rest of us.

On the palette it's the hoppiness of an IPA vs. the ease of a pilsner.

For evening TV entertainment it's the differences between True Blood and Twilight.

With baseball season primed to play ball it's the hopefuls vs. try-again-next year's.

Daylight Savings has highlighted the light vs. dark mornings.

As evidenced all over the media and Facebook posts and beyond, it's the reaction to the health care bill and those who think health care is a free market commodity and those who think it should be a public service like education.

It's hacking off branches and at the same time watching new growth sprout--the difference between green and brown on the landscape.

Morning coffee or grown-up time in the evening, it's the ways in which Robin and I approach things differently.

And what I think is that difference is a gift. That fall and spring are two times each year when, for various reasons and in various ways, those differences take center stage.

I think I do well when I recognize differences and smile at them. I think some of my best days are a celebration of both existential and surface diversity. Especially, and soaking in the hot tub of paradox, in that it's through these seeming differences that the similarities and commonalities come again to the surface and speak their truths of how they all stream together--different bubbles from the same jets, spinning in circles of the same water. How's that for a Monday morning metaphor? ;)

A gift this morning, the next two pages of my notebook, which Anna had borrowed to draw in on random pages some time ago in the backseat while we were driving.