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"Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life." ~Sophia Loren
I leaned over the side of the boat to wash the fish slime off my hands only to be greeted with “Kerplunk!” My Ray Bans slipped from their perch on the brim of my hat and traveled directly to the bottom of South Manistee Lake. Ohw! That hurt, on so many levels. That undersize largemouth bass I had released moments before was the last thing on my mind.
I felt sick even though I was trying to tell myself that they were just a dumb pair of sunglasses. But my relentlessly unforgiving brain kept up taunting me. “Yeah, just sunglasses. $300 sunglasses. Prescription sunglasses. Only 6 months old. How dumb can you be to place them on top of the brim of your hat to be able to get the hook out of the fish? See, you do so need the bifocals the eye doctor was pushing you to consider. And why no safety strap?”
No, that last thought was a gently echoing message that my wife and fishing partner had moments before delivered to me to consider. In fact it was her bass I had just released that got my hands slimy.
“Why didn’t you have a strap on them like mine have?” she said, “You put this one on my sunglasses for me.”
She was of course right about that. I had spent time rigging a strap for her sunglasses so that just this sort of thing would not happen to her while she was fishing or kayaking. Did I somehow think I was immune to this happening to me?
My point of all this came to me later. After the mosquito repellant dissolving part of my kayak seat later, which after seeing what OFF does to plastic I am having a troubling time thinking about ever spraying it on my skin again. That point is that I am always going to be a victim to doing dumb things. It seems to be a profound part of my nature. Thus far they have not been overly damaging but have been nonetheless annoyingly frequent. Not happening more frequently but kind of consistently constant. Something I am going to have to budget for. Part of the household budget. Mitch’s stupid blunders line item.
“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.” –Arthur Schopenhauer
Tunnel vision. Narrow vision. No vision. Broad Vision. Television. I often wonder what the world around me truly looks like. I know what I see, but is it what others see. I know it isn’t color blind like I see. Red/green colors cause me problems personally so I know the spectrum varies. Maybe to not be red/green color blind is the defect? So the rest of you who see red/green colors are abnormal.
But do people see the same thing when they look at it or do they use their eyes and mind to form the shape, color and movement of the existence they dwell in. Does the mind decide whether it likes something or not, then allow the picture to reflect that prejudice?
The quote from Schopenhauer is actually talking about a different definition of vision. That definition (in my humble opinion) is more in how far or how little we can stretch our minds around new technologies, new ideologies and new futures. And these are amazing leaps of vision that are driving us forward. Often times they are dragging me forward against my will.
I probably look at the time before computers took over the world (yes, they have) and remember the simpler life. Much like my parents remember the time before television. My grandparents generation would have reflected on the time before the telephone, the horseless carriage and expressways.
I try to embrace the new, regardless of how it often makes my skin itch and crawl. At the same time I long for what I grew comfortable with. I wish I could look under the hood of a car and recognize some of the parts. The dipstick for the oil is about the only thing that hasn’t changed in about 50 years.
So I hold onto the simple things that don’t have to be updated by Microsoft and doesn’t require a mouse click or a touch screen. I adapt and utilize those modern technologies and other mechanical things but they don’t give me comfort. Not like my old lawn tractor, acoustic guitar or the pencil that I first wrote this blog with.
"It's not a lie if you believe it." -- George to Jerry in a classic line from a Seinfeld TV episode
Never would I have believed this till I experienced for myself officiating on the sidelines at a youth football game.
Following a pass play down the sidelines, I suddenly encountered a sudden impact on my shoulder. It was a face. A coach's face. A coach's face where the face of a coach shouldn't have been during a live part of a football game. Ouch. That would be him as I was relatively unfazed by the contact. He, on the other hand, stood stooped over clutching his lower jaw looking as if he may begin to start spitting out teeth. I noted this as the play ended and was returning to my position on the line after the incomplete pass. And by rule as I passed him, threw a penalty flag at his feet. "That will cost you 15 yards for contacting an official," I verbalized to his.
"Whaath!" he exclaimed, as I proceeded to report the infraction to my referee for the enforcement.
And this is where it got interesting or disturbing, you can choose.
The referee decided to explain the penalty to the coach. What a sight as he tried to generate sympathy by remaining stooped over and clutching at the offended part of his face. And streaming out the denial that I did this intentionally and he was where he was supposed to be and it was my fault.
Referee then returns to center of field, yours truly returns to his post on the sidelines, now noticeably clear of coaches standing where they weren't supposed to be.
And then he did it. He couldn't keep his mouth shut, even as he still was holding it with his hand like it was a baby bird.
"I wath where I wath thuppothed thu be and you hith me," came from his lips.
I saw red.
I turned and said, "Excuse me."
"I wath where I wath thuppothed thu be and you hith me, ran righht intho me."
Somewhat shocked, and gazing not only at him but the 5th graders and assistant coaches looking at me as well awaiting my response, I lost my temper.
"You mean to tell me you are going to stand there and LIE to me in front of these kids and your coaches about where you were standing to make it seem that I am the bad guy. Despicable. You are supposed to be a mentor and a teacher and you are going to LIE to me. I know where you were standing. I hit you. If you were standing where you say you were standing I would have run into about 10 of your players or coaches and would have run down my chain crew as well before I ever even got to hitting you. I don't seem to remember hitting anyone but you. That's because they were where they were supposed to be and you weren't. Now are you going to keep trying to lie to me? Because if you are I am going to throw another flag on you as well as toss you out of here and you can watch the rest of this game from the parking lot. Well?"
He backed into the coaches box where he faithfully remained for the rest of the game.
And I hope by those that witnessed me standing against the lie, they may have learned a bit about personal responsibility and integrity.
A few plays later, the guy on the down-box indicator said that he thought I gave the guy a bit of a forearm shiv as I ran into him. Then he smiled and laughed.
Maybe I did and maybe I didn't. An official has to protect himself out there.
"By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man." -- Immanuel Kant
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long. -- E. E. Cummings
So the end of the fall season is streaking at me like arrow shot from a bow.
Sometimes this has me as the deer and sometimes the hunter.
Thwack!
That could be the sound of this time of year. It makes me strangely melancholy and reflective as I watch the leaves fall to the ground and turn from reds and oranges and yellows to the shades of brown and rot. The trees that once stood so vibrant now cast grim silhouettes against the more-ever grayish sky. The night sky even seems to be heavier above me, cold and darkest gray with it's stars that struggle to shine through the gloom.
I actually begin to feel the energy and vitality begin to seep from my body. My wife starts to show signs of hibernation as the days grow short and light is rationed by the sun in our part of the hemisphere.
It is no wonder that Halloween relates perfectly to the glum season that it dwells in. You can almost seem to hear all the different parts of the natural world start to form a scream. Damp, dark, frosty, decomposing. Surrounding almost everything but the brave mums of the gardens.
I think that there is more to fear about autumn that is beyond my understanding. And I wonder if I have not known autumn for too long.
I wish for Persephone to remain, to keep summer's dance alive. But alas, she returns each year through the cleft in the earth. Abandons us to face the approaching winter with windblown rains and tumbling skies. We are left armed only with jackets and shovels and hope. A hope that we will witness the rebirth of another spring.
Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay. -- Robert Browning
“Why don't you write books people can read?” -– Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941)
Nora Joyce's quote really popped out to me especially after I attempted to read her husband James Joyce's book, "Ulysses." This particular book shows up on lists of must read books all the time so I naturally assumed it was going to be good. Wrong! I found it unreadable at it's best. If I hadn't picked it up at a thrift store I would have returned it. Though it was big and heavy enough it may make a literary-statement of my good taste as a doorstop.
But the real wisdom of the quote is the fact that Joyce didn't know how to listen to his wife. Not only was she smart enough to recognize a rambling, disjointed, incoherent, trivial and confusing piece of writing, she spoke up and told her husband so. My guess is he ignored her as he went ahead and published it. All 265,000 plus words.
The people who rave about this book and it's stream-of-thought style must not experience that type of thinking or they would have a different opinion of this type of writing. I actually like to read to reign in that way of thinking.
Now I have had moments where stream-of-thought process takes place in my head and if I was to try and write it down it too would be mostly incoherent. I have a very scrambled brain as far as it staying on task when it is in a problem solving mode. And the older I get the more that stream leads to the thought "Just throw it out!" My wife actually called me a hoarder today when I asked where I got all the tubes of chap stick that are crowding my top dresser drawer.
Following is a launch into the stream of thought of my brain.
"I don't hoard chap stick, I just never seem to have a tube on me when I need it and then I stop and buy one tube and when it is no longer needed because my lips are no longer chapped I put it in the drawer with all the others that are in there along with the ones that I have never even opened and I have no idea where they came from or why I purchased them when I already have a supply in my top drawer..."
Thus begins my stream of thought which would eventually end many, many words later with something altogether unrelated to chap stick--like motorcycles or earthworms.
"Just put a tube in the car," I was told.
But they melt when it gets too warm.
I think I will start with throwing out the extra, open chap sticks.
And why do I have 3 mini-flashlights in this top drawer? I don't think I want to ask my wife that question. She'll just tell me what I don't want to hear.
"I confess, I do not believe in time". -- Vladimir Nabokov
I am beginning to believe that Nabokov was right when he confessed that he does not believe in time. Even though I feel it passing, like some kind of constant breeze, I still have trouble relating it to myself. I am still a mind that feels ageless in some ways. Almost trapped I would say. So as my physical being moves through time and space, my mind and my spirit seem not to be moving in step.
And that is where belief resides…inside oneself.
But all around me I am faced with the consequences of the passage of time. I am faced with the changing seasons, with the loss of hair, children becoming adults and these markers go on and on and on. It is such a bewildering world and everything, and I do mean everything , seem to be measured with a yardstick of time. Some physicists even look to time as some sort of matter. Solid. Something with measurable mass.
A butterfly is the result of a egg being laid and then hatching after a certain passage of time followed by its emergence as a caterpillar. But wait, the caterpillar then spends some “time” chomping its way through its preferred foliage until it turns into a pupae. Again, after a passage of time, that pupate will emerge as the butterfly we see flickering across the back yard or attempting to cross the road only to end up imbedded in a passing car’s radiator. End of time for the butterfly? Perhaps.
Perhaps not. What part of time really stopped for the butterfly? What part of time stopped for the person behind the automobiles steering wheel?
Maybe we spend too much time trying to gauge the movement of time. It is if you look at it with some open-minded perspective, a solid entity. It is glacial in a sense. The actual passage is slow but the speed is measured by those outside it. A fruit fly is but a brief parallel along the path being carved by time. A butterfly, a bit longer. A dog or a Man, longer. A jellyfish, longer yet.
For me, my calendar is starting to become my enemy. It throws those dates with those things written to do and stands there with so much power. It is like a bully standing over me but in this case I seem to be bullying myself.
So you can maybe see why I wishfully am starting to be a disbeliever in time. To believe is to enslave. I wish to be free of time so I can live.
I think the themes of belonging and parentage and love are obviously universal. -- Christopher Eccleston
What does it mean to belong? What belongs to me and what belongs to you and what belongs to someone else?
I remember many moments that gave me the meaning that I belonged to something, something that is bigger than the world that surrounds our body and being. We exist in this large web of living creatures, the respirations of plant life and inanimate planetary structure that gravitates us to the surface of the Earth. We surely belong to the so-called circle of life, now more as caretakers of the planet then how our ancestors interacted with it. Primitive man and his early cultures engaged at a more primal level. We are more aware now, but we seem to be doing a poorer job as caretakers than we are surely capable of, spending far too much time devouring things. As our civilizations expanded and grew it appeared the sole mission was one of create no matter what and leave the mess behind. Our bubble of civilization is expanding and pushing and is getting close to bursting its poisons over everything.
But if effort is put forth to belong once again as a functional part of existence, we may regain the perspective that most of us have lost along this evolutionary pathway. We can start with recognizing belonging in minute ways and start our transformation there. Realize that we can belong to many things and many people and to nothing if we choose. But we will be unable to stop others from feeling that we belong to them. And I do not mean in a possessive form of belonging. I myself belong as a parent to my children, a husband to my wife and a son to his parents. These positions of belonging are a commitment to others that I take very seriously. They are what I consider longstanding, permanent attachments. Serious belonging.
Another favorite type of belonging is the recognition of moments of belonging that you don’t initiate. My thought wander to a time, when off-guard, my wife came up to me for no reason and put her arms around my neck and kissed me. It was a moment that was unexpected by me and I was first puzzled by how I felt. I gradually came to recognize this moment and why it felt strange because it really belonged to her. It was significant to me, and welcome, but it also made me relinquish any thoughts that somehow I could share what she felt. I felt great and I felt love but the act of that moment belonged to her.
I hope we can all seek out those moments in time where we belong and that belonging will make a true difference.
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