I am just learning about Substack. Never heard of it before. I am watching what you are doing in order to get a grasp of it. I had a website prior to Etsy that allowed me to write blogs which I found I really enjoy. Unfortunately, I had a terrible experience with Hackers and short of having my bank accounts emptied, I learned about hacking and web security, but it ultimately brought me to this point.
This, journal entry was surprisingly similar to a blog I wrote for my website "FairyDustOnline.com" (no longer active) but from a little different perspective. I don't know if I am supposed to do this here, but here goes:
Are You Centered or Are You Floored?
As a child my family, mother, brother and sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, pets, and occasional friends, would all meet at the little beach resort town of Capitola, CA. Once per year, we would stay in a series of little cabins along a river that ran through an area of town within walking distance to the beach. The name of these cabins were called Kum Taka Rest, and the little old woman who ran these tiny abodes grew dahlias with flowerheads big enough to wear as hats, which we did when she would deadhead the blossoms, oftentimes before they were due just so we could enjoy playing like we were fairies with flower blossom hats.
Each morning, after being startled awake by the train rumbling over the old wooden trestle that spanned the river next to our cabins, it was time to get out the door as quickly as possible while the adults were still eating pastries and drinking coffee, eagerly trekking barefoot down the path to the beach, hopefully avoiding being chased and nipped by the river ducks and geese; those feathered and squawking marauders pirating the bounty of dropped lunch bags by terrified children.
The beach was lined with arcades, bars, and restaurants, where we spent meager allowances on visiting the arcades and succumbing to the scent of fries before chasing the waves and building sandcastles once the funds were depleted. The evenings were filled with family potluck style dinners and what could be called “lively” political discussions among the adults after I was tucked into bed. This raucous banter concerned me as I didn’t understand what they were arguing about so vigorously, or why, but somehow they ended the verbal assaults congenially, having thoroughly enjoyed the debate, needling and cajoling each other while wandering off to their respective lodgings.
Of course, we all were waiting for the high point of our vacation for the one evening of pure joy, when we would drive over to the Boardwalk in nearby Santa Cruz and ride the Roller Coaster and the Merry-Go-Round, where we would reach for the rings as the painted horses swept by the almost out-of-reach (for me) ring dispenser. The whole experience was sensory based with everything whisking and whirling and frightening and illusionary, scented with the smell of popcorn, caramel, and salt water taffy against a background of billowing pipe music from ancient instruments. Amid the neon colors and flashing lights loud, persuasive carnies were adept at fostering hopes of winning large stuffed animal prizes hanging en masse at the rigged nickel booths. The odds were rarely in your favor, but even if you won just a Cupie doll, at least you had “trophies” to take home with you for the memories.
So what does this have to do with being centered or floored? Not much, but it was the setting for my analogy, which probably belongs only to me until now as I am sharing it with you. When I think of the terms of being “centered” or being “floored”, I can’t help but think of the crazy attractions in the Fun House at the Boardwalk. Most of their features were designed to keep us off balance, or created illusions and distortions. It was a safe way to be in a “twilight zone” setting in real life and provided an hours-long playdate for parents for only 50 cents for a half hour or all day long.
One ride they had was a spinning disk, or wheel, a large circular yet shallow cone with a raised center. The object was to stay as close to the center as possible without sliding to the floor. After the wheel was loaded with kids, the operator would start the spinning wheel and with increasing speed, one by one the riders would end up floored. The lucky ones would be situated safely in the center of the cone, where the movement was the slowest. There were no prizes for being the last ones left on the wheel. Being the best was good enough. Since I was a little girl, I was usually floored right away but I kept trying.
The analogy I share is simply about staying centered to keep from being floored. From the raised center of the spinning disk, we observe life changes and challenges from all directions at a speed that makes observation reasonable. Riding the center not only reveals all potential circumstances from the highest point, but more, it has a lot to do with choosing how we respond to them, and while we can't always control things that happen to us, we can control how to respond about them by availing ourselves of all the information the center has to offer from that high point. When we are “off center”, we can’t see all our options, either through being too low on life’s wheel or it is spinning too fast (or both).
I looked up definitions of being “centered” and most included finding peace, however, peace isn’t found through attaining perfection, peace is found through accepting the best options available at the time, and also accepting that those options constantly change. There’s an old saying that used to be popular, “Just when I thought I knew all the answers, they changed all the questions!” How true!
Peace is knowing that we are guided around minefields through intelligence, divine or otherwise, based on clarity of vision. Peace is being able to understand that outcomes, whether nebulous or distinct, are not endings or ultimately the even best outcomes, but tend to create stepping stones to help us move forward through the ever evolving torrents of life that surround us. This is where being centered on the axis from which life spins off, the source of movement and support so to speak, is the highest point of vision available to “see” at that moment.
How we choose to respond to circumstances is as important as the circumstances we are confronting. There are no simple answers other than there is an answer. It may not always be the best or immediate, but it stabilizes what we have available in order to maintain a necessary equilibrium at the moment. If you aren’t happy with your immediate solutions, new ones are always on the horizon because of the changing nature of life and learning and we can take the opportunity to re-examine the former solution for missed road signs or if it fits with finding the next increment of the new solution. Sometimes we just have to accept the options available at that moment, and have faith that it would probably turn out to be a necessary step toward a better resolution. It is hard for me to believe that everything in life isn’t some piece of the puzzle, no matter how small. There really aren’t any accidents in my opinion, regardless of how one's life appears to be affected. Everything is a learning experience one way or another, regardless. Why fight it?
The only thing guaranteed in life is “change”. Becoming centered is a way of finding acceptance of and adaptation to the constant changes of life, lest we forget and lose our balance, ending up floored! Even being floored is not a fallible outcome, but a position from which we may have to work harder to reach center again just like running after an already moving train in order to board it. There is, however, a shorter path to becoming re-centered again which comes from those “Aha” moments when we realize “Ok, I get it!”, and we find ourselves already centered there, the truth being that we never left it, only that we forgot and lost our balance. That’s all.
To see a spinning wheel in action, highlight and click the link below (Not this Santa Cruz Funhouse):
Yes, the views are similar from different perspectives. My childhood in the 60s, from the surface looked fairly idyllic. I never met my father. He and my mother were divorced when she was pregnant with me. He had a drinking problem and a gambling problem. But I had an extended family that would help out, and an older brother and sister. I was the youngest. The 60’s were so transitional but everyone sought after having families like “Leave It To Beaver”where each day was predictable. It was a time of a desire to be complacent, but it was not attainable with all the disturbance and uprisings. It’s kinda like the high pressure meeting the low pressure forming a vortex. As on the spinning disk, the high point was the safest place to be because you have a better vantage point to operate from at a speed that keeps you upright. Sometimes it does feel like balancing on one toe (I liked that analogy). I’m generally not a complacent person. I think my middle name is change. Kruchev, made a statement once that there is no such thing as a status quo, you are either moving forward or moving backward. I have found this to be immanently true about most things in life. Trying to keep things from changing is futile. You can either face a corner in the road with fear and trepidation or with curiosity and excitement, but either way you’ve got go around that corner. I’m starting to babble now. I guess I should get up and have some coffeeeeeee! Thanks for sharing your insights. I’m glad you found that post.
I just now noticed this story. Nice. Kum Taka Rest - great. made me laugh. I recently wrote something in the neighborhood of the subject...
"Sometimes I think all of us—no matter when we’re born—waking up into somebody else’s mess. Not just one mess, but the accumulated wreckage of generation after generation of messes. Wars, lies, mistakes, accidents, stupid decisions, bad guesses, heartbreaks, power grabs, fear, resentment, ambition, survival and all the leftover junk no one ever cleaned up. It’s all still swirling around when we get here.
When I try to explain what it was like growing up in the 1960s, that’s what keeps coming back to me. The feeling of stepping into the middle of a cultural whirlwind. Protests, assassinations, rock stars dying, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, people freaking out about hair length and music and drugs and God and the government, corporations and institutions and endless commercials trying to sell people things they didn’t know they needed. It was all flying past at once—loud, urgent, dangerous, strangely beautiful and at the same time commonplace as if everything was exactly as it was supposed to be.
But I’m not sure it was any more complicated than any other time. You could probably drop down into ancient Rome or the Dust Bowl or a Tuesday in 1437 or a Wednesday this week and find the same spinning mess—just in different costumes. The names change, but the chaos feels familiar on both a grand scale and right in your own house. A constant maelstrom.
Which got me wondering about the whirlwind itself. Not just as a metaphor, but as a real thing. I mean—how does a whirlwind even work? How does it keep going?
I imagined all the swirling debris—twigs, leaves, paper cups, the house in Wizard of Oz, whatever—and it occurred to me: wouldn’t the whirlwind need to keep that debris evenly distributed in order to keep its shape? Wouldn’t an imbalance throw it off? If everything got stuck in one corner, wouldn’t it collapse?
But then I realized—it doesn’t need balance the way we think of balance. Not stillness. Not fairness. It needs movement. It’s not about equal weight on every side, it’s about constant motion. The whole thing stays alive by not holding still. It’s a kind of organized chaos—just enough order to keep from falling apart, just enough disorder to keep from becoming rigidly predictable.
That’s how it felt growing up. I wasn’t in control of anything, but I was inside something. Something spinning. Something carrying all of us forward, even if we didn’t know where it was going.
And just like a real whirlwind, most of us were too busy ducking flying debris to wonder what the point of it was.
I used to think balance meant stillness. Like if you could just stop everything, quiet it all down, and get things perfectly even, you’d find peace. But that kind of balance always felt like death to me. The real kind of balance - the kind I’ve learned to live - isn’t sitting on your butt with your legs crossed and your hands folded. It’s more like spinning on one toe in the middle of a storm.
That’s what life feels like. What grief feels like. What being a child in the middle of the 1960s felt like.
It wasn’t about keeping things from falling. It was about staying upright while they did. It was about learning to move with everything that was moving around me—assassinations, wars, family breakdowns, dead rock stars, dead brothers. The wind never stopped. The flying debris never stopped. But somehow, there’s this strange kind of grace in staying up anyway. Even if it’s just for another spin.
Balance, I’ve come to believe, is not found in the absence of motion. It’s relationship with motion. It’s learning to feel where the center is, even as the ground shifts. It’s knowing when to lean, when to pivot, when to let go – to bend with the wind, to move with the current.
I just realized I mentioned the wrong Russian, and I spelled his name wrong anyhow. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who stated “if you aren’t moving forward, you are moving backwards.”
LOVE THIS!!! Timely too as I was just having a text conversation with an artist friend of mine and I mentioned to her what I've often stated in that 'less is more'. I used to have a fantasy of driving an 18 wheeler across the country and fill it up with great junk for my assemblages. But then I realized that I'd be so overwhelmed with tons of junk I'd probably give up. But I've been in situations where I couldn't find the quality junk I needed and was forced to use what I had and figure out how to stretch what I had and use them in new and wonderful ways. You writing "limitations force you to innovate" is such TRUTH. I will forward your article to my friend. Thank you for this very timely essay.
I am just learning about Substack. Never heard of it before. I am watching what you are doing in order to get a grasp of it. I had a website prior to Etsy that allowed me to write blogs which I found I really enjoy. Unfortunately, I had a terrible experience with Hackers and short of having my bank accounts emptied, I learned about hacking and web security, but it ultimately brought me to this point.
This, journal entry was surprisingly similar to a blog I wrote for my website "FairyDustOnline.com" (no longer active) but from a little different perspective. I don't know if I am supposed to do this here, but here goes:
Are You Centered or Are You Floored?
As a child my family, mother, brother and sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, pets, and occasional friends, would all meet at the little beach resort town of Capitola, CA. Once per year, we would stay in a series of little cabins along a river that ran through an area of town within walking distance to the beach. The name of these cabins were called Kum Taka Rest, and the little old woman who ran these tiny abodes grew dahlias with flowerheads big enough to wear as hats, which we did when she would deadhead the blossoms, oftentimes before they were due just so we could enjoy playing like we were fairies with flower blossom hats.
Each morning, after being startled awake by the train rumbling over the old wooden trestle that spanned the river next to our cabins, it was time to get out the door as quickly as possible while the adults were still eating pastries and drinking coffee, eagerly trekking barefoot down the path to the beach, hopefully avoiding being chased and nipped by the river ducks and geese; those feathered and squawking marauders pirating the bounty of dropped lunch bags by terrified children.
The beach was lined with arcades, bars, and restaurants, where we spent meager allowances on visiting the arcades and succumbing to the scent of fries before chasing the waves and building sandcastles once the funds were depleted. The evenings were filled with family potluck style dinners and what could be called “lively” political discussions among the adults after I was tucked into bed. This raucous banter concerned me as I didn’t understand what they were arguing about so vigorously, or why, but somehow they ended the verbal assaults congenially, having thoroughly enjoyed the debate, needling and cajoling each other while wandering off to their respective lodgings.
Of course, we all were waiting for the high point of our vacation for the one evening of pure joy, when we would drive over to the Boardwalk in nearby Santa Cruz and ride the Roller Coaster and the Merry-Go-Round, where we would reach for the rings as the painted horses swept by the almost out-of-reach (for me) ring dispenser. The whole experience was sensory based with everything whisking and whirling and frightening and illusionary, scented with the smell of popcorn, caramel, and salt water taffy against a background of billowing pipe music from ancient instruments. Amid the neon colors and flashing lights loud, persuasive carnies were adept at fostering hopes of winning large stuffed animal prizes hanging en masse at the rigged nickel booths. The odds were rarely in your favor, but even if you won just a Cupie doll, at least you had “trophies” to take home with you for the memories.
So what does this have to do with being centered or floored? Not much, but it was the setting for my analogy, which probably belongs only to me until now as I am sharing it with you. When I think of the terms of being “centered” or being “floored”, I can’t help but think of the crazy attractions in the Fun House at the Boardwalk. Most of their features were designed to keep us off balance, or created illusions and distortions. It was a safe way to be in a “twilight zone” setting in real life and provided an hours-long playdate for parents for only 50 cents for a half hour or all day long.
One ride they had was a spinning disk, or wheel, a large circular yet shallow cone with a raised center. The object was to stay as close to the center as possible without sliding to the floor. After the wheel was loaded with kids, the operator would start the spinning wheel and with increasing speed, one by one the riders would end up floored. The lucky ones would be situated safely in the center of the cone, where the movement was the slowest. There were no prizes for being the last ones left on the wheel. Being the best was good enough. Since I was a little girl, I was usually floored right away but I kept trying.
The analogy I share is simply about staying centered to keep from being floored. From the raised center of the spinning disk, we observe life changes and challenges from all directions at a speed that makes observation reasonable. Riding the center not only reveals all potential circumstances from the highest point, but more, it has a lot to do with choosing how we respond to them, and while we can't always control things that happen to us, we can control how to respond about them by availing ourselves of all the information the center has to offer from that high point. When we are “off center”, we can’t see all our options, either through being too low on life’s wheel or it is spinning too fast (or both).
I looked up definitions of being “centered” and most included finding peace, however, peace isn’t found through attaining perfection, peace is found through accepting the best options available at the time, and also accepting that those options constantly change. There’s an old saying that used to be popular, “Just when I thought I knew all the answers, they changed all the questions!” How true!
Peace is knowing that we are guided around minefields through intelligence, divine or otherwise, based on clarity of vision. Peace is being able to understand that outcomes, whether nebulous or distinct, are not endings or ultimately the even best outcomes, but tend to create stepping stones to help us move forward through the ever evolving torrents of life that surround us. This is where being centered on the axis from which life spins off, the source of movement and support so to speak, is the highest point of vision available to “see” at that moment.
How we choose to respond to circumstances is as important as the circumstances we are confronting. There are no simple answers other than there is an answer. It may not always be the best or immediate, but it stabilizes what we have available in order to maintain a necessary equilibrium at the moment. If you aren’t happy with your immediate solutions, new ones are always on the horizon because of the changing nature of life and learning and we can take the opportunity to re-examine the former solution for missed road signs or if it fits with finding the next increment of the new solution. Sometimes we just have to accept the options available at that moment, and have faith that it would probably turn out to be a necessary step toward a better resolution. It is hard for me to believe that everything in life isn’t some piece of the puzzle, no matter how small. There really aren’t any accidents in my opinion, regardless of how one's life appears to be affected. Everything is a learning experience one way or another, regardless. Why fight it?
The only thing guaranteed in life is “change”. Becoming centered is a way of finding acceptance of and adaptation to the constant changes of life, lest we forget and lose our balance, ending up floored! Even being floored is not a fallible outcome, but a position from which we may have to work harder to reach center again just like running after an already moving train in order to board it. There is, however, a shorter path to becoming re-centered again which comes from those “Aha” moments when we realize “Ok, I get it!”, and we find ourselves already centered there, the truth being that we never left it, only that we forgot and lost our balance. That’s all.
To see a spinning wheel in action, highlight and click the link below (Not this Santa Cruz Funhouse):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PeKDx_ihtI spinning disk (1925 -1971)
Yes, the views are similar from different perspectives. My childhood in the 60s, from the surface looked fairly idyllic. I never met my father. He and my mother were divorced when she was pregnant with me. He had a drinking problem and a gambling problem. But I had an extended family that would help out, and an older brother and sister. I was the youngest. The 60’s were so transitional but everyone sought after having families like “Leave It To Beaver”where each day was predictable. It was a time of a desire to be complacent, but it was not attainable with all the disturbance and uprisings. It’s kinda like the high pressure meeting the low pressure forming a vortex. As on the spinning disk, the high point was the safest place to be because you have a better vantage point to operate from at a speed that keeps you upright. Sometimes it does feel like balancing on one toe (I liked that analogy). I’m generally not a complacent person. I think my middle name is change. Kruchev, made a statement once that there is no such thing as a status quo, you are either moving forward or moving backward. I have found this to be immanently true about most things in life. Trying to keep things from changing is futile. You can either face a corner in the road with fear and trepidation or with curiosity and excitement, but either way you’ve got go around that corner. I’m starting to babble now. I guess I should get up and have some coffeeeeeee! Thanks for sharing your insights. I’m glad you found that post.
I just now noticed this story. Nice. Kum Taka Rest - great. made me laugh. I recently wrote something in the neighborhood of the subject...
"Sometimes I think all of us—no matter when we’re born—waking up into somebody else’s mess. Not just one mess, but the accumulated wreckage of generation after generation of messes. Wars, lies, mistakes, accidents, stupid decisions, bad guesses, heartbreaks, power grabs, fear, resentment, ambition, survival and all the leftover junk no one ever cleaned up. It’s all still swirling around when we get here.
When I try to explain what it was like growing up in the 1960s, that’s what keeps coming back to me. The feeling of stepping into the middle of a cultural whirlwind. Protests, assassinations, rock stars dying, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, people freaking out about hair length and music and drugs and God and the government, corporations and institutions and endless commercials trying to sell people things they didn’t know they needed. It was all flying past at once—loud, urgent, dangerous, strangely beautiful and at the same time commonplace as if everything was exactly as it was supposed to be.
But I’m not sure it was any more complicated than any other time. You could probably drop down into ancient Rome or the Dust Bowl or a Tuesday in 1437 or a Wednesday this week and find the same spinning mess—just in different costumes. The names change, but the chaos feels familiar on both a grand scale and right in your own house. A constant maelstrom.
Which got me wondering about the whirlwind itself. Not just as a metaphor, but as a real thing. I mean—how does a whirlwind even work? How does it keep going?
I imagined all the swirling debris—twigs, leaves, paper cups, the house in Wizard of Oz, whatever—and it occurred to me: wouldn’t the whirlwind need to keep that debris evenly distributed in order to keep its shape? Wouldn’t an imbalance throw it off? If everything got stuck in one corner, wouldn’t it collapse?
But then I realized—it doesn’t need balance the way we think of balance. Not stillness. Not fairness. It needs movement. It’s not about equal weight on every side, it’s about constant motion. The whole thing stays alive by not holding still. It’s a kind of organized chaos—just enough order to keep from falling apart, just enough disorder to keep from becoming rigidly predictable.
That’s how it felt growing up. I wasn’t in control of anything, but I was inside something. Something spinning. Something carrying all of us forward, even if we didn’t know where it was going.
And just like a real whirlwind, most of us were too busy ducking flying debris to wonder what the point of it was.
I used to think balance meant stillness. Like if you could just stop everything, quiet it all down, and get things perfectly even, you’d find peace. But that kind of balance always felt like death to me. The real kind of balance - the kind I’ve learned to live - isn’t sitting on your butt with your legs crossed and your hands folded. It’s more like spinning on one toe in the middle of a storm.
That’s what life feels like. What grief feels like. What being a child in the middle of the 1960s felt like.
It wasn’t about keeping things from falling. It was about staying upright while they did. It was about learning to move with everything that was moving around me—assassinations, wars, family breakdowns, dead rock stars, dead brothers. The wind never stopped. The flying debris never stopped. But somehow, there’s this strange kind of grace in staying up anyway. Even if it’s just for another spin.
Balance, I’ve come to believe, is not found in the absence of motion. It’s relationship with motion. It’s learning to feel where the center is, even as the ground shifts. It’s knowing when to lean, when to pivot, when to let go – to bend with the wind, to move with the current.
It’s dancing on one toe in a whirlwind."
I just realized I mentioned the wrong Russian, and I spelled his name wrong anyhow. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who stated “if you aren’t moving forward, you are moving backwards.”
LOVE THIS!!! Timely too as I was just having a text conversation with an artist friend of mine and I mentioned to her what I've often stated in that 'less is more'. I used to have a fantasy of driving an 18 wheeler across the country and fill it up with great junk for my assemblages. But then I realized that I'd be so overwhelmed with tons of junk I'd probably give up. But I've been in situations where I couldn't find the quality junk I needed and was forced to use what I had and figure out how to stretch what I had and use them in new and wonderful ways. You writing "limitations force you to innovate" is such TRUTH. I will forward your article to my friend. Thank you for this very timely essay.