ADAPTABILITY
BLOG 167
July 18, 2026
KINDNESS, HOPE, POSITIVITY (OOPS) POSSIBILITIES!
“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
(Alexander Graham Bell)
On July 18 I wrote in my journal:
“I have to write a blog about the ability to adapt, because I suck at it.”
Here’s why. On Thursday a member of the company’s IT team did me the great favor of coming over to West Van to set up my new iPhone. In the process I unearthed the new iPad version that I was given months ago and ignored because the only thing it did differently, as far as I could see, was require a different charging cable. The kind I could never seem to find. I resented all this new technology that was dragging my block-of-concrete-feet into the “next generation”. I felt played by the gods/demons of progress. So I went from an IPhone 13 to a 17. New cable and all.
And then I lost it. Literally and figuratively. Couldn’t find my new phone anywhere, despite the “FindMy” app indicating that it was at my exact address. As I ran around in progressively agitated circles, it was my saintly husband who figured out where it had to be, in my car, five floors below me, in the parkade of our building.
Needless to say, my positivity journal, (which I realized in retrospect was supposed to be a possibility journal, in line with the Chautauqua lifestyle blurb I included in the last blog) wasn’t very positive that evening. Or bursting with possibilities, except maybe finding ways I could permanently dispose of all my technology. And perhaps move to the Falklands. Or some as yet undiscovered/unmodernized tribe in the Amazonian jungle.
But time passed, and once I’d simmered down, I continued pondering ways to bring kindness, hope and possibility/positivity to my surroundings. Enter a juvenile crow that got trapped on our balcony, for lack of the wits to turn around and see the endless escape routes right behind it. It had indeed been thusly “trapped” for a couple of days, we realized, and that the loud ruckus of swooping and darting crows nearby had been created by its frantic parents.
By the time we spotted it, it was banging futilely against the glass railing of the balcony and had badly frayed its tail feathers from rebounding onto the deck. As best we could, we moved any furniture blocking it from seeing its route to freedom, even creating a makeshift ramp it might launch from, while a small battalion of its friends and relatives squawked and swooped in their defensive manœuvres.
Finally I had the bright idea to scoop it up with a broom and lever it over the railing. Jim gently wielded the broom and in seconds we’d liberated our otherwise annoying and unwelcome feathered “friend”. If the latter adjectives weren’t clear enough, let me state for the record: we don’t like crows. Not at all. I once broke a glass panel of our railing by throwing a rock at one particularly cheeky nuisance. But who can resist a shot at heroism?
In one fell swoop we had lived up to the Chautauqua motto of kindness, hope, and possibility. A teenaged crow had lived to fly another day, battered tail feathers and all. And I was reminded, as per Alexander Graham Bell, or another, proactive variation that AI offered on the same topic:
“When one door closes, find another. And what if there isn’t another door? Then you try a window. And what if there’s not a window? Then you find a sledgehammer and make a window.”
Aum Namah Sivayah