Murder

A woman walks by a murder, but doesn't call the police. What happened?

Welcome to my world of minute mysteries. I've filled hundreds of hours hiking with a whole myriad of mysteries that make us think differently to solve them. The only way I've gotten some folks to keep moving up Thunder Mountain is to fill the time with these puzzles. And bribe them with clues if they get to the next stopping point.

There's a cabin on the side of a mountain with two people dead inside. What happened?

A car stops in front of a hotel and someone cries, "That's it. I'm broke." What happened?

Romeo and Juliet are dead on the floor of a locked apartment with glass and water all around. What happened?

You can only figure out the answer by stepping out of the expected assumptions and expanding the way you think about words and situations.

It's a murder of crows.
The cabin is the cabin of an airplane.
The car is a game piece in Monopoly.
Romeo and Juliet are fish.

I'll never hike with you now that I've given you the answers. 

But I do think it is a valuable skill not only to persevere on long hikes, but to think about challenges with vast possibilities instead of static sides. I'm not a huge either/or thinker. 

This is some of what I was thinking on my hike today as the murder flew over my head while I was processing and grieving another violation of sacred space. That's what a shooting in a school feels like. It's not the numbers. Every day 93 people die from gun violence*. The violation of schools, churches, shopping centers are soft targets where folks should feel safe (I also think relationships, homes, and streets where most violence happens should also be safe).

I let myself grieve because I don't want to become immune to such horror, but I'm weary of thinking there are sides when we talk about violence and the deadly boost guns give to our sinfulness. 

Actually, reading quantum physics has made me rethink whether anything has sides, let alone complex issues in a broken world. 

I'm a systems thinker so I'm ready to set some goals and figure out creative ways to get there. I'm pretty sure that neither blogging nor Facebook are good places to define those goals, but I do think communities like churches, city hall meetings, and service clubs can be those places. 

Maybe we all need to go on a strenuous hike together and let our brains do some lateral thinking while we do the tough work of figuring out ways to keep our gravitation towards violence less lethal. 

* The Brady Center averaged the most recent five years of complete data from death certificates (2011-2015) and estimates of emergency room admissions (2010-2014) available via CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control's Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/. Data retrieved 1.3.17 and 4.29.16 respectively. Numbers may not sum to 100% because of rounding of CDC averages.