Editor’s Note: The Data Feed
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I awoke on Wednesday morning to a text from my sister, who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. It had been -27 F there as she’d returned from the polls the evening before – unusually early for such cold, even for there.
I snapped a photo of our inside weather station and sent it to her: 50 F at 6 am – unusually warm, it seemed to me, for this time of year.
With dawn breaking a little earlier again thanks to the return to Central Standard Time, I was able to take a break from my treadmill for the outside balmy air. As if it weren’t beautiful enough, it smelled like woodsmoke and composting leaves, the few still clinging to branches backlit by the soft, early light.
A study in contrasts. All this beauty outside; inside my head, not a pretty place, with the unresolved presidential election banging around against the usual demands of a deadline day. But contrasts allow us to see things more clearly.
We still didn’t know who our president will be as I was writing this Wednesday afternoon. Wisconsin went for Biden by some 20,000 votes, as we all learned about 11 am or so. That left the electoral votes still hanging in the balance from Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
It’s an interesting space between the knowing and the unknowing. We can fill that space however we want. The outside or external is like a data feed. What we do with that information once it comes in to us is completely up to us. We can fill it with stressful anxiety over what’s to come, or with hopeful possibilities of what could be.