Seek and ye shall.

Every day, I am a lot like Christopher Columbus.  Well.  Sort of.   We are all sort of like that.  We discover things.  Just like Columbus, these things may not be brand new to all people … but they are brand new to us.  Specifically.  (Like.. .the Indians knew about North American for thousands of years before Chris came along.  But it was a new world to those Spaniards.)

Nonetheless…..  Discovery is a wondrous thing.

As our boy Webster puts it….  to discover is to find…. unexpectedly.  Like a ‘something’ or a ‘someone.’   It means that we become aware of something, or we observe… or find… perceive… recognize.   I am telling you.. this is a great word.

On any given day, we may do this a hundred times, or more.  And we just don’t know it.

This morning, Mary and I went up to New Paris. There are a few Antique Shops in the town.  Now, we aren’t really antiquers.  At all.  But we both think it is fun to look at old things, and ….. discover.

There were troves of treasures there.  The building itself was very cool. From basement to third floor… packed with antiques.  It was built in 1873 by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Lodge #303 (“IOOF”).

The discoveries continued.  The Odd Fellows.  — Little time out here —  WHY in the heck are they called Odd Fellows. What is it… exactly… that Odd Fellows do?  Well… they started in England.  I do know that.   And. The Odd Fellows are one of the earliest and oldest fraternal societies.  But the whole deal about their early history is pretty dang obscure… and mostly…. undocumented.   Their first lodges were in London around 1730.

Another discovery.

Back to it.  Our Odd Fellows in New Paris had some finance problems.  They were compelled to sell the property in 1899.   And get this!  They sold it to somebodies named the Knights of Pythias (“K of P”).  I am NOT making this up.

The building became home to the Castle Hall of Harmony Lodge #396 in 1909….  with those new Knights, and all.

So, when I ate my breakfast this morning… my incredible eggs and oatmeal….  I had NO idea, a couple hours later, I would be standing in a Castle Hall of Harmony… holding a creepy stuffed squirrel … while Howdy Doody looked on.

You see.  This discovery thing is the whip.

And that all makes me think about us.  Humans in this world.  I truly believe, a big part of what we are “supposed” to be doing here… is making “goodness.”  In all that we say and do. And part of that path involves “growing” as people.  Learning about the world, and more importantly, about ourselves.

Every day, we have the chance to make internal discoveries, which we can share with all of the other humans.   Making good.  Finding.  Growing.  Learning.

Yep.  Discoveries are truly wondrous.  The Explorers.  One and all.

 

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“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”
― Albert Szent-Györgyi

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“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

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“It is … through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.”
― Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

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