A TREASURE OF CONNECTION IN SAMARKAND
When I read Joel Wade’s exceptional essay on The Treasures of Human Connection, with his example of a “mico-moment of connection” being a ”nice conversation we have with the checkout person at the grocery store,” this Uzbek lady came to mind.
She manages a store of pottery art – you can see how gorgeous it is – in the legendary Silk Road oasis of Samarkand. Welcoming me, she explained she was talking to her daughter on her cell phone. I bought something irresistibly pretty, but before I left, I asked if I could take her picture as I was taken by her warmth and friendliness. The picture you see captures that, especially in her eyes.
Samarkand is in Uzbekistan deep in the heart of Central Asia. It’s as remote and exotic as you can get from your local grocery store. Yet a micro-moment of human connection can occur in Samarkand just as it can in your hometown.
We travel around the globe to see world-famous sights and spectacular wonders, but so often it is the special people we meet – if only for a micro-moment – that make our journeys so memorable. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #215 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
[As promised in last Friday’s HFR, this Monday’s Archive is Solar Warming, originally published in TTP on September 29, 2005: almost 21 years ago. Think of the trillions of dollars wasted on the hoax of Global Warming aka “Climate Change” since then. Yes, trillions, the greatest scam in human history, which perverted science (the only way a scientist could get a government or NGO grant was to “prove” it with GIGO computer models, never to disprove it which is the essence of real science), when it was nothing more than an evidence-free rationale to replace a failed Marxism (after the collapse of the Soviet Union) for fascist control over everyone’s life.
[TTP: RINOs are getting slaughtered in Texas, Mamdani is sending the police forth to actually police NY’s streets, and POTUS has passed his latest health assessment with flying colors – this is a good day to take a break from politics and take a gander at the great unknown.]
Cleaning out the attic, I recently came across my daughter’s first pair of walking shoes. They were the white leather real tie-up shoes where a parent had to actually tie the laces so the child’s foot would be securely held inside the shoe.
Reuters reported this week that virtually all major oil refineries in central Russia have been forced to halt or scale back fuel output after Ukrainian drone strikes. The affected plants represent more than 83 million metric tons of annual refining capacity — roughly one quarter of Russia’s total — and account for more than 30 percent of Russian gasoline and about a quarter of its diesel.
For the last year and a half, Americans have been slammed with politics to the point that it has made vast numbers of people nearly crazy.
People who are extroverts – people who are more sociable, who like to be out, talk, and interact with other people, and who gladly put themselves out into new situations – tend to be happier than people who are not.
