look up no. 5

From Schmidt & Weston blog

I'll explain myself.

I have been posting these photos with the theme of look up without comment (one, two, three, four) because, well because I just like them.

But also, I've noticed that humans tend not to look up very often. I imagine there is some deep anthropological reason for this, but I'm through with reading long text books. Not looking up is sort of odd since there is an awful lot going on above our heads.

Back in the day when I taught people how to fight forest fires (I'm still sort of struck that I actually taught such things) I always ALWAYS made it abundantly clear that looking up was very important. Trees grow up taller, for the most part, than the average person and when they get caught on fire, you can miss something fairly important like flames... a falling tree... a helicopter or airplane about to drop water/retardant mud; all things dangerous. I'm sure my students thought me quite insane, (but that might be due to my habit of teaching from my hammock. It was, after all, government work.) When I was in the field actually doing the fire fighting, my neck would get sore at the end of a day... but nothing smashed my head... ever, making that silly hardhat completely redundant.

Granted, our worlds might not be as dangerous as a forest fire, at least mostly not. But there are still a lot of things going on up there. Some of those things are interesting.