An Unruly Mind

Real talent comes with a curse. For those who are playing the glass bead game of the mind and doing it on the fly the responsibly of conducting the background work seems like just so much bother.

As to me I was not really talented but I was impacted by this mental laziness. When I was young book learning came easily to me. Other things did not. Learning how to do home repair or how to show respect and kindness to people was elusive. But the early 1960s was an era where the path from elementary school to college was valued. I flourished more than most in class because my memory at that time was a steel trap. The problem came in when I got to university and I had to learn to study. It took time but I got it. I got it eventually.

My youngest whose video is posted on this space is very similar to me in that way. He is genuinely nicer than I was at his age. He can grasp things on the fly with an amazing deftness. But he struggles with discipline. To sit and pour over a book is not in his wheelhouse. He is all about picking up the highlights but he almost refuses to drill down to the depths of the material. It is so frustrating to me to watch this. He could be great but on paper he looks average.

He will come to the place he was meant to be. I am sure of that.

Doors

Some days it is hard to push through the door. Pushing the door outward on a cold drear day in midwinter is very hard. Biting wind and those stinging bits of ice or sleet that will pelt your face make that rightward twisting of the doorknob difficult, so very damn difficult. But you got to be ten miles from here in twenty minutes.

On a sunny day it is hard to twist the knob from the other side. Daffodils explode yellow from the ground. Birds engage in a call and response so enticing you don’t want to go in. Awake and aware in nature’s cathedral the urge to linger is so very strong. The light, the warm light, so fills the mind. Rays falling randomly are driving away the petty annoyances. Bills and flyers will remain on your table and desk long after dusk has come and passed. Leaving that door closed is so easy as you sit back in an old wrought iron chair in the garden.

We are all the same. When you come to a door you make an evaluation. Is it in or out? Your mental process either happens quickly or it can take minutes, hours or months. Asking a girl out for that first date by knocking on her dormitory room door requires you have a plan in mind. You had better be able to explain why you were there on her floor by her memo board if you lose your nerve.

On those other occasions when you heard the harmonies of voices and the strumming of guitars inside a pub your active thought does not even enter the process. It like the two old compatriots driving north and the one asleep in the backseat asks as he awakens, “Where are we?” The driver says “We are passing Spike’s Keg O’ Nails Tap.” The passenger sitting up asks, “Why?” Some doors open just that easily; there is no question and there is no hesitation.

On occasion interior doors leading to spaces that we have chosen to walk away from for months or years haunt us. It might be the office of a deceased spouse up on the second floor of the house. It might be the bedroom door for a child that had passed too soon, any child passing goes too soon. Maybe it leads into the junk room where the projects and parts of things to be completed (and the broken things) migrate. Standing in front of those doors especially places where the sense of another lingers can be very hard indeed.

In our lives we will open hundreds if not thousands of doors manually or by stepping on a mat triggering an automated arm. We may hit a brass circle with an icon that tells us this place is accessible for the differentially abled. With joy we will open doors. With hesitation we will open doors. With anticipation we will open doors. With trepidation and sorrow we will open doors.

Warm Day Cold Missouri Waters

April 17, 2015

My hope was that today would be a productive day.  Having previewed my work most of my cases are what you would call relatively challenging.  These are people with long term arrest histories and years of daily alcohol and/or drug use.  I also have to polish up what I wrote yesterday and then field phone calls and complaints.  You don’t tell people “no” without having to take a few calls and review some older materials.  So far the slogging is slow.  Two orders are just partially completed..

At the end of the day I want to go see a small folk concert with my youngest son.  There are three performers calling themselves the Men of Words.  The only one of them I am passingly familiar with is the gent who wrote “Cold Missouri Waters” about the Mann Gulch disaster.  I have heard some of his other songs on the Pandora Stan Rogers station.  At least he should be good but often on these three way bills you come across a gem you didn’t know about before. Here is to discovery.

The radio this morning said it was going to go up to 23 today.  Yeah I use my phone to stream the Toronto CBC morning feed to the big assed blue tooth speaker in the kitchen.  I know 23 is warm and my guess is that it mean the lower 70s.  I tried to look up the simple cheat sheet formula for this but my computer hung up on the search. One of these days I will learn the conversion formula. The ride in was clear and the sun was bright.

I am not going to dwell on bigger ideas today.  Monday is my last birthday that I will acknowledge.  As I wrap my head around that I will probably go running to the quotes and to the volumes of the great thinkers.  Today I am just looking forward to lunch with my wife and son.

Fixing the Toliet that Flowed into the Eternal

As I sometimes do when I am once again home from a day of work I settled down this evening to read a short piece from the New York Times.  Often at the end of my labor I cannot face the horrific headlines about beheadings in the name of God or of our need to purge the slackers from the public dole.  Tonight then my ink on paper diversion was a tiny item on the front page A tale of a building improvement caught my attention.  

How this tale hit the front page I don’t know.  Sometimes the Times surprises me with an odd choice for the pricey front page real estate. This tale was about a man in Rome who simply wanted to fix his toilet.  When he dispatched his handy person sons to set about the task tracing the sewer blockage their labors led to the discovery of a roman granary and a Franciscan chapel. The discoveries have yet to cease.

My eye was pulled to this tale because a couple of weeks ago I had found myself listening to a tale on the CBC about trying to build a subway stop in Rome.  With each new shovel of dirt some amazing archeological find presented itself until they just gave up on building the stop.  The author of that story went further chasing deep into streets that lie beneath the city that were laid out in the 3^rd century. She visited ancient Roman baths and various art works that are only seen by a very few.

So much of our lives are built unknowingly atop the abandoned worlds of others.  People who lived and died with purpose are now totally gone from the memories of all the living and their names are recorded in no books.  By now their bodies are not dust, they are loam or muck. The air they drew into their lungs those many years ago we now draw into our lungs.  Lives lived short or long they are gone, gone and forgotten.

In a thousand years this orb may contain nothing that resembles life.  Or maybe a plague with have winnowed humankind down to a manageable number where the threats of earth’s other inhabitants will again be real to us.  Maybe some birds will come back and the polar bears will have ice to frolic on. But in any case the words I write and the life I live will mean nothing to whoever or whatever might remain.  I will be but a layer that will be built upon.  I might be part of a raised bed of heirloom tomatoes.

Don’t take this as despair.  Take it instead as a call to make life better now.  Give love to those around you.  Offer forgiveness whenever it is possible.  Help. Act.  Do the next right thing.  We get so little time here on this orb and either literally or figuratively what we do and who we are will be built upon by others (I am hopeful that the planet will  have life for a long time). Knowing that we are staring communally into a void act as if choices matter.

Distracted

We are an odd group. As a people we have learned to live in the tiniest of things.  With our focus on the small details of comfort have lost a sense that we should be looking at the longer perspective.  Each day at lunch I slip out to but a cheap coffee refill and steal some Wi-Fi.  As I sit here I realized how this culture, i.e., the coffee shop meeting space with its lattes and mocha chinos did not exist 20 years ago.  When I was coming up in the late 1970s there really was no equivalent. But it is sooooo damn important today.

Most of my socializing up through the end of law school was done sitting in mostly vacant parking lots with three or four cars pulled up and people drinking beer out of their trunks, in study lounges or in bars.  There were some dive restaurants with a counter and stools where older people bought a burger and a donut and some black joe.  But they were for a select few.  If we weren’t drinking we were sitting on the empty steps of a buildings.

It seems like what we have now focused on is something akin to a Japanese tea ceremony but without the formality.  We are diverted by short moments.  We are isolated by our tech. Perhaps not coincidentally our attention spans are so very tiny. About all we can hold in our mind is the thought needed to order using the phrase extra hot with an extra shot and half soy/half cream.

Nobody here in this aromatic box is talking about God or the lack of God.  Nobody who is listening to the hissing of coffee being steamed is talking about personal accountability.  Nobody here is talking about anything that will matter more than 24 hours from now.  What happened to make us so short sighted?

More importantly what can we do to move ourselves back to a point where we are wondering about obligation and duty?  What will trigger us to look at what it means to give of ourselves for the common good?  Damn if I know but I hope we figure it out.