“A tree falling in the forest” is a thought experiment that (almost?) everyone knows, but I had to look up the origins.  It was proposed by George Berkeley in 1710, and then repeated in various forms up to an exchange between Einstein and Bohr.  The general idea is the same: If you don’t observe something, did it happen?  If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  You can arguing multiple sides because it’s impossible to check without observation, which makes it such a juicy idea for the brain to consider.

Maybe that’s why my brain started chewing on it when Carolyn Hax brought it up as part of her answer.

The situation: an adult child doesn’t really want to talk anymore to his/her thoughtless parents.  The person asks: “Do I just ghost my own parents? Seems no matter what I do, they’ll think I’m awful and wrong.”

Hax replies:

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I am a super-user at my library, there several times per week.  We read a lot.  And usually the books are in great shape.  Checking them out from the library saves a lot of space on our bookshelves.

But.

I was on the waiting list for China Rich Girlfriend along with 477 other people.  It was finally my turn to get the book, and I picked up the copy from the hold shelf and brought it home.  Then I opened it.  There was food smeared across a bunch of the pages, and something that looked like the skin of peanuts in most of the seams.  I held the book over the rubbish bin and tried to clean it out as best I could as I vomited in my mouth.  Why would someone do this to a book?

I tried to read the copy, but the food stains were turning my stomach, and I felt like I had to wash my hands every time I read it.  So I purchased a copy (plus the next one in the trilogy).  It’s rare to get a book in this state, though it’s the second time it has happened to me this summer.

How are the books at your library?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight.  Unlike the secular New Year in January, Jewish New Year is celebratory but also contemplative.  It’s a serious holiday that requires participants to do a lot of soul-searching.  How did you live this past year?  Whom did you hurt?  What do you want to do differently this upcoming year?  Who needs an apology?  There’s 100% less champagne, and 100% more gut-twisting thinking.

And there is also beautiful ritual that weaves through the holiday into the following 10 days leading to Yom Kippur.  You get a little over a week and a half to contemplate who you are and who you want to be.  There’s a weight to that.

Lifehacker had a post about grief; how to help someone who is grieving.  It’s all good advice, mostly advice you already know.  But there was a part at the end that changed the way I see grief.  The therapist, Emily Adams,  interviewed in the article states:

She also said it’s important to remember that grief is a ritual. We get through it by participating in it. Yell on a mountain top, write a letter in the forest and bury it, cry in the sea. Let yourself express your loss so you don’t just have it sitting there inside you, unchanging … Your grief isn’t you. It’s just a part of your life.

Grief is a ritual.  We get through it by participating in it.  No one can grieve for you, and because the ritual is personal, no two expressions of grief look alike.

It’s not a thought that makes grief any easier, any more than knowing that the fasting on Yom Kippur is ritual makes your stomach growl less.  But it does allow for some space between the person and the feeling as well as an understanding of the point to the feeling; that we are trying to make sense and honour the space we’re in.

Maybe it just struck me because I read it before I’m about to enter multiple days of ritual, but it helped me to realize grief for what it is; something that is doing its hardest to help during a time period that only hurts.

We’re saying goodbye to a car this weekend.  Luckily, it’s going to people I love, so there’s a chance to see it again.  (Can you tell that I’m not really good with goodbyes?)  I am glad they are taking it because this is the car that we got a few weeks after the twins were born.  It’s the car that I drove them around in when they were infants.  The one where they’d throw their binky into the hatchback and then howl as we drove down the highway.  It’s the one where they crushed Cheerios against every surface.  Where we listened to hours upon hours of Dan Zanes.

It’s not really the car that I’m missing.  It’s the memories of the kids being infants.  It’s missing the baby years.  I don’t really want to go backwards to listening to them howl in frustration while we’re going 60 on the highway (seriously, why did they always toss their binky into the open trunk?), but I miss the quiet moments.  Wedging myself between their two car seats so we could do a double bottle feed.  The conversations we’d have as we took wrong turns.  I miss that.

It’s never really about the thing itself, but instead, all the memories that come with it.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff…

Okay, now my choices this week.

Dreaming of Diapers breaks down the concept of being happy… enough.  About being happy, even when parts of your life are not going as planned.  Being happy when you’re living out the “ever after” and it doesn’t look how you thought it would look.  And comparing happiness to other points in your life; are you happier now than you were then?  It’s a thought-provoking post.

Searching for Our Silver Lining is going through stress, and it’s affecting her mood.  She’s blue, and it isn’t one thing.  It’s just a lot of things all coming together at the same time.  It’s life at its sloggiest.  This post is about knowing that it won’t always be like this, but it’s hard right now. and you need to honour the “right now.”

Lastly, Bent Not Broken has a post about an exchange with a neighbour that got under her skin.  She writes: “I don’t write about this for sympathy, rather I write it to show that grief is not linear. This happened after a long period of doing really well, being confident, and fully embracing the life I’ve been given. And yet words, simple, innocent words, cut right through me.”  And that is precisely why I think this is an important read.

The roundup to the Roundup: Goodbye car.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 31st and September 7th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I’m a middle child, and I’ve been lovingly teased my whole life about being a middle child.  But it didn’t occur to me until I read this article this summer that we don’t have a middle child in our family.  We have twins — two — and one is the oldest and one is the youngest.  The position I hold in my childhood family has been eliminated in our immediate one.

I don’t know many people with three children.  Most of our friends have somewhere between zero and two.

The article states: “The American Middle Child is now an endangered species. As the ideal number of children per family has shrunk to two — that’s not me speaking, it’s demographics — the middle child, in a very real sense, is disappearing.”  Today, two-thirds of women with children have one or two.  Not three or more.  Which means: “Middle children, the most populous birth-order demographic throughout most of human history, will soon be the tiniest.”

I don’t think birth order is the end-all-and-be-all, but I do think that where people fall in the family influences their personality a bit.  How can it not?  And if a position is eliminated, how does that affect the greater world?  I don’t think people should have more children just to keep middles around, but it is an interesting thing to think about.

Once you have a child, an oldest child exists.  Once you have a second, a youngest child exists.  But you have to keep going to create a middle.  We weren’t successful, maybe that’s why I’m drawn to thought-provoking articles like this.

Are you a middle child?  Do you think birth order means anything?