AT LEAST WE DIDN'T DIE

Sometimes when you are not sure what the muse wants and it’s hard to know where to begin. I envy writers who have their stories mapped out from beginning to end and all they have to do is flesh out the ideas already organized. Ive never been good at that. What I get are ideas and feelings that pass through in the moment like a soaring bird’s shadow. When I get that invitation I have to run with it or let it go. That is when I try to imagine where it came from (the story) and where it wants me to go with it. Everything has its own story but the dots all connect, everything is interconnected. 

Today’s story has been compounded by unexpected, difficult circumstances and my part in it is to tread that narrow way between when and how to assist and staying out of the way. As one struggle gives way to another there are timely pauses to reflect and I don’t need a counselor to tell me, “You are too old to be doing this.” Then familiar quotes that never loses their way, never fall on deaf ears, they come back around. “Let us rise up and be thankful for if we didn’t learn a lot today at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so let us be thankful.” Then, like potato chips, one quote leads to another. Joseph Campbell cuts straight to the quick; “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. The Warrior’s approach is to say, ‘Yes’  to life: ‘Yea’ to it all.” 

For Jospeh Campbell the Warrior and the Hero (with a thousand faces) are effectively the same character, just at different stages. One is forward leaning while the other is more reflective. It works the same for everyone whether the path you follow takes you around the world or never goes beyond the garden gate. The Warrior has an insatiable appetite for adventure if you will. It’s about process much more than outcome. Even though we are supposed to move through stages we retain remnants of the former after all. Without them one’s backstory would read like a boiled cabbage recipe. The Buddhist-like quote is not from the Buddha himself but consistent with that eastern disposition and he would like it. I take comfort in the two together. 

Currently as a spectator-ally my part in the day’s trajectory is limited to patient understanding and moral support. Barbara Streisand recorded a song in the 1990’s titled, If I Could. It comes from a parent’s perspective about children who have moved on, beyond her reach. To resolve her own reservations she mouths the words; If I could, I would try to shield your innocence from time, but that part of life I gave you isn’t mine . . . It’s all she can do. It’s all I can do. 

I didn’t know this was where the muse was taking me but here we are. This growing old can be bittersweet and be thankful for the sweet part, at least we didn’t die. I am still curious and I still have hopes, mostly for loved ones but some yet for myself as well. I don’t have much faith in Faith but my own, personal little dot is connected to all the other dots and I owe them something. John Muir (famous naturalist) is credited with many similar versions of this quote: “Try to tug on anything at all and you find it is connected to everything else in the Universe.” Another version says; “. . . and the whole Universe tugs back.” I take comfort in Muir’s words too. Maybe the most important part of telling a story is knowing when to stop. 

SLIP SLIDING

Road trips are generally good, even when they are not but you do that and it seems to work. Paul Simon (singer) wrote a wonderful song nearly fifty years ago that simply keeps on keeping on; Slip Sliding Away. He drops little clues about living a deliberate life and how those plans slip away unfulfilled. I told anybody who would listen to me that song, that ’Life’ has a double edge, either you have it or it has you. When you weigh and measure the phrasing and melancholy, I got it. I remember the lines; “She said a good day ain’t got no rain. She said a bad day’s when I lie in bed and think about what might have been.” Then the mortal caveat leaves you wishing for something that doesn’t exist: You know the nearer your destination the more you’re slip sliding away. All I could ever do was accept, it is what it is and if I can’t slip and slide away then, might as well stay in bed and make believe. 

I am in Corpus Christi with time to kill. Sleeping on the road has a long backstory with me. Managing money has always been a priority, one I struggle with. For whatever reason, spending good money to be unconscious in a strange bed just never met my need. Being comfortable while asleep seemed a contradiction of logic. I’ve always been able to close eyes and drift off. Five minutes or five hours later I can get up and go. If I am exhausted then all I need is the seat back and something soft for my head. I have lots better use for my dollar-bills than sleeping through. If I can’t be present to enjoy it, it doesn’t count and if I am present I might as well be putting miles between where I was and where I want to be. 

But age is taking its toll on me and that easy-peasy fall-asleep trick is harder to pull off, and staying asleep requires limber shoulders, hips and flexibility I can only remember. Don’t give up on me, I still sleep in safe, warm, dry little slots along the way, any time of day. But I’ve come to depend on ‘Warm’. Old dogs still learn but things change and I'm not ready for some of the new tricks. The years (numbers) can be insulted and shunned but they do add up and I have too many to dismiss. Traveling in cold weather, to keep feet warm I need to get horizontal. That generally means motel, AirBnB or having an amigo with an extra bed strategically located along my route. Right now I am killing six days and nights in Corpus Christi, TX. I could stay in the truck cab at truck stops. Their showers work for old men in pickups at a fraction of the price for a room at Best Western. After an early a.m. shower and clean clothes, walking across the lot at a Flying J truck stop is hard to beat. By the time I drive for half an hour there simply is no difference. 

My reason for ‘Six days & nights in Corpus Christi is another story but come bed time nobody cares. My host is Mary Gonzales, an abuela - grandmother & teacher’s aide who put four kids through college and converted their space, (bedrooms) into AirBnB rooms. I love the neighborhood (barrio). The houses are all different types and colors with low chain link fences around small, well groomed yards. Several cars or trucks in every drive and you can hear neighbors calling after their kids or husbands or whom ever needs to get their behind home. The norm spoken is ‘Spanglish’ that comfortable blending of Español and English that even I can follow, usually. 

So here I am about as far from my home as this trip will allow. I wasn’t really ready to be blessed with more money than I have time but live long enough, stay healthy (that’s the recipe). So paying dollars for a warm bed instead of waking up with cold feet and an impatient bladder, a long walk from a bathroom; I’m glad for a good night anywhere. Good sleep just comes but good wake-ups stay with you for a while. I never thought much about it but dying with unspent money makes me look careless. But I know, it's not a choice. It'a about the journey and slip sliding is the only way I know. 

SUPER BOWL

  I don’t hear about it all that much now but there was a time when I played football and then I coached it. Last night was Super Bowl #57 and I did my game-day thing just like I do every game day. Still, stuff happens, things change, the world turns and people move on; or not. I keep track of who wins and loses and I like some teams more than others but I do not watch games. My football experience began with boys playing boy’s games, the joy of running after each other, like playing tag but you get to knock people down. I wanted to win but win or lose, I wanted to play. After an eight year interim with the army and the work force I found college and football again. Our coaches were educators and philosophers. They emphasized preparation. Practice does not make perfect; you play like you practice and anything less than perfect practice just reinforces mistakes and poor play. That was the message I got on the field. Then there was; the better you play the more you get to play and that was everybody’s goal. No matter the score, being on the field was better than sitting next to the water bucket at the end of the bench. I did get stronger and better but so did my teammates and my playing time was limited to late in games when we were winning. That worked out to my satisfaction as we won a lot, we were very good. But I didn’t have to be taught about being part of something bigger and better than anything I could do by myself. I understood that my primary job was helping our best players prepare for game day. 
After a 27 year coaching career the game itself was pretty much the same but the message had changed. Winning had become the only reason to play and coaches that failed there were let go. The message was “WIN” whatever it takes. The philosophy I had been so well schooled with no longer meant anything. Cheap talk comes easy when you have great players and the competition makes you look even better. My last years (3) were working for an old coach like me who I knew, went to the same college I did and still evoked the ‘perfect practice’ model. He went out of his way to develop average kids and give everyone a chance to contribute, to play; and we won a lot. 
I don’t watch football games any more. I can fast-forward through the highlights and see all I want in a few minutes. I will not do sour grapes over where the game has gone in my lifetime. I loved it for a long time but then you move on. I have long lived friends who survived that gauntlet and can’t get it out of their systems but I don’t dwell in that house anymore. 
My home town team won the Super Bowl last night. There is a sea wave of red, white and gold all over town today and I like it when they win. But I do not identify with wannabe heroes whose closets are full of franchise clothing and paint their bodies as if they make a difference in the score, as if the crowd noise wouldn’t be the same without them. Some things are best experienced vicariously but no matter how big your banner of how loud your band of groupies may be, it is not your game, it is a sad example of mistaken identity. It says something about make-believe inclusion that I don’t want to rub off on me. My life is pretty good as it is and I doubt if I start watching grown up men playing boy’s games for the money.

BIG PICTURE - EVOLUTION

  Driving is good therapy, it always has been. If I were an over-the-road trucker it might not seem so but then I am not a trucker. With my tiny teardrop camper in tow and the pickup configured for a month long adventure it took eight days (3,500 miles) to end up back in my driveway. Two days of high winds and below freezing nights in the high desert were made worse by a generator that would not gen. With no suitable options I opted for three more days of Interstate Therapy (driving home). I don’t want to labor over the weather but I suspect something about being both old and cold with nothing to take the edge off of either. 
I usually write while on the road but this time it was long hours behind the wheel and little else. So getting back into (Journal) mode will keep me busy today. On January 6, I posted a piece that would be Part 1, It Doesn’t Have To Be True. It addresses the Human Condition, just a glimpse of a much bigger picture but I’m not well organized enough to frame the larger one. Imagine, a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are short written works. Each one may stand on its own legs or require the support of adjacent pieces. But all together there is a story there. I think this effort is like so much of what I do; it doesn’t need to be read necessarily but it does need to be written. An appropriate title for the whole story would be, ‘Big Picture’.
When asked about his writing process Leonard Cohen alluded to a conversation he had with Bob Dylan. Cohen asked how long it took for Dylan to write a particular hit song. The reply was quick, “About fifteen minutes" he said, "in a the back of a taxicab.” Then Dylan returned the compliment asking how long it had taken for Cohen to write his classic, Hallelujah. After a short pause he replied, “Eight years.” I get it. It can take a very long time and ever so many rewrites.
Big Picture Part 2 - Evolution. Here is a great example of Harari’s observation; It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to work. Our culture tends to frame everything in terms that fit neatly into a human lifetime  or better yet, the time it took to grow up, (a blink in evolutionary time). This is true for both individuals and for the culture at large. In isolation polygamy can work for some individuals but in the greater community it does not. It tells me that individual behaviors and group dynamics are very different animals but there is an unspoken sense that people are people are people, by the pound or by the masses. The ancient Greeks figured it out 2,500 years ago. “The truth is whatever we agree upon.” Believing makes it so.
From an evolutionary stand point there is only one concern with changing environment, genetic or behavioral adaptations. Everything else is a distraction. That one thing would be, does the adaptation favor (proved some reproductive advantage for individuals that have the adaptation)? After all, it will be their DNA that survives and is passed on to sustain the species. Individuals without the good gene will ultimately be culled out of the breeding population by simple mathematics.
We do not adapt in order to meet a need. We discover what we already have that makes us different. If that becomes an advantage in the reproduction game, we reap the benefit. Those who had been the best suited as breeders (before the the environment changed and the better gene came to fore) lose that advantage and may over several (many) generations disappear altogether. An example might by a slight difference in how well water is stored in tissue during dry climate change. Most students do just enough to make the grade they want and this kind of environmental overview doesn’t mate very well with test questions. Who besides me and the few others like me who keep coming back to the thorny questions, who cares?
Myth is still a driver in human culture. It provides a plausible explanation when imagination is all we have to draw from. We believe in stories that make us feel good in the moment, not wanting to hear the caveat. It satisfies in the moment and that is our truth. I am old already and I don’t have much to lose. But our descendants from the future will suffer the consequence of our narrow and near sighted nature. Evolution does not have a plan. It only takes the cards it gets and plays them all. In that scenario the real game is not about the high cards in the deal but what has survived the discarded. Sometimes three kings lose and other times all it takes to win are two tens. 

NO ILLUSIONS

  Sometimes spending all day in the car can be an exercise of discovery and reawakening yet on a different day it can be no more than road noise and angry truckers. The word ‘dreadful’ is probably too harsh for the situation, ‘bleak’ might make a better fit. Three days out of four on the road with a funeral and binge eating in the middle, it wore me out. Waking up on the fifth day has me wrestling with inertia, moving my feet but going nowhere. 
News of a death in the family came the same morning I was on schedule to leave on an Arizona adventure. Now I have a full day, maybe two days to do laundry and repack, reload the truck and camper. By the time I cross into New Mexico I hope the ‘bleak’ aspect of last week will have given way to the adventure again. But when you lose someone you have been on a first name basis with for the past half century, a ‘Ho-Hum’ and a ‘Yawn’ are not sufficient to reboot ‘normal’. 
Four hundred years ago John Donne’s poem, “No Man Is An Island” would become universally acclaimed. He made the case for how interdependent human beings are on each other and how one’s fate is linked to everybody else. His words are ubiquitous, celebrated everywhere even if his name is not, “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” I get it, I really do. We are super-social animals and the passing of one certainly diminishes the whole. At my age I don’t need reminding. The last three funerals or memorial services I’ve attended were for friends who were younger than me. By now I know that numbers don’t say much about quality of life or life span itself. What counts is good fortune, good health and wise practice. Still, each time the bell tolls it foreshadows my own destiny and the fact that I know not when or where, it is what it is and that’s good. I recently observed a shred of good advice; life is short, eat dessert first. 
I always thought old people who fixated on their ills and the passing of their generation mates were wasting precious time. I hope I never feel so spent that there is no reason to move my feet or to begin something someone else may have to finish. But then I have no illusions about an afterlife. Those who truly believe this life will be followed by an even better one; I envy them. If that were so, driving 100 mph in the dark with my lights out should expedite the good life. If you win the lottery there is a public record with name, date and the amount (for taxes of course). But with the odds against winning at over a million to one, why would I buy a Lotto ticket as an investment? If there was no public record and no compelling, tangible evidence, they wouldn’t need to pay off any winners, just float an illusion based on a hearsay promise. What a believer believes doesn’t have to be true, it just has to make them feel good. So I live without a promise, for the here and now. That’s what I thought about in the car yesterday on the long drive home. I got from (A) to (B) but otherwise it was mostly a lot of squinting into the sun. 
On rereading this piece, I feel obligated to include this disclaimer: I really do envy Big ‘B’ Believers. My unbelief has no malice. ‘Faith’ and ‘Believing’ are neither more nor less than blank pages in my Life Story. It would resinate with me the same as someone else’s expired credit card. Religion on the other hand is a human construct, just as contemptible as its leaders, the Lords of their own ambition who gravitate to self righteous politics when it serves their appetite. In my case, ’Envy’ doesn’t mean you want what they have for yourself, only that you can appreciate its appeal. 

EAT DESSERT FIRST

  There is nothing like a death in the family to realign priorities. It's like being in free fall, hoping to land on your feet without breaking something. Then again, a death in the family can be as low key as slow dancing, not stepping on others feet. It depends on the strength of the bond. Still, by any measure you sense a transition and grapple with fate, even if just for a moment. For several generations I have made the distinction between ‘Blood’ family and those who slip in by the ‘Backdoor’. The blood bond is inherent, fixed in time and space before we were born. It provides a pedigree for as long as shared DNA stirs in the gene pool. On the other hand, family bonds that slip in by the 'Backdoor' are acquired. They require only mutual respect and affection and in lieu of a pedigree they need to be nurtured.
When I was maybe 7 or 8, my infant cousin died suddenly in an accident. I didn’t fully understand the far reaching disorder it created but neither could I escape the consuming grief and the weight of such a loss. It was a helpless feeling. It would take years and a wider, deeper experience before my father’s words came home to me: “Blood is thicker than water.” and he was right, it is. Then, when I was 34 (1973) I moved my family from Colorado to Michigan. With three little boys and a daughter on the way it truly was a new beginning. In that first fall season I worked a new job in a nearby town. My wife met and made friends with a woman down the street who had a toddler and a newborn baby girl. Her husband was a local pharmacist and the women bonded through the burden of husbands who worked long hours and managing small children who seemed always underfoot. 
You know that you share the ‘Backdoor’ bond when half a dozen children lose track of which grownups are their parents and assimilate into a single litter. We didn’t think much of it at the time but our kids understood the aspect of acquired respect and affection and extended it to authority as well. If Jeanette or my wife told one of them, “Stop that right now or I’ll skin you alive.” it didn’t matter who it was or where we were; you were in her jurisdiction. It didn’t matter whose ‘Ouchie’ needed first aid, the kid went instinctively to the nearest adult. Any doubts as to ‘Backdoor’ or just neighbors, watch the kids. They respond to ‘Backdoor Principle’ long before they understand their pedigree. 
Yesterday early, my phone rang. It was one of my little girls by the ‘Backdoor’. As we age, unexpected telephone calls at strange hours tend to bring bad news and I didn’t have to be told. We lost her pharmacist dad to cancer over 20 years before and the ‘Backdoor’ bond got a little tighter. Jeanette had been losing ground to a grave illness for several years and this phone call was the bad news. When we lose someone we love, we close ranks. Today my Blood family is changing plans, making travel arrangements and beginning to close ranks.
In a few days we will be in West Michigan again. There will be many others doing the same thing, saying “Goodbye”, saying “I’m sorry,” asking "Is there something I can do?" Our small part in this ritual is to make real the axiom; “Joy shared is joy multiplied.” and “Sorrow shared is sorrow halved.” There is something to be said for proximity, meeting our own need to simply be there. We will take comfort there as well. Then the sun will come up on a new day and we will treasure even more than before, the joy we still share. Life is short, eat dessert first. 

IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE TRUE

  This blog was born in August of 2012 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since then its following has remained a sparse few folks who either Googled their way here by mistake or already knew me and for one reason or another kept coming back. Thanks! I appreciate their dropping in. It keeps me working on vocabulary and knowing when to be concise (brief but comprehensive) which is not easy by the way; and when it’s alright to just throw words at the page from a meandering stream of consciousness. 
I like to identify with Andy Rooney, a writer featured on the CBS program, 60 Minutes. He passed away over a decade ago at 92 but when I feel writer’s block and ideas stay stuck down in a neural wrinkle I still default to, ‘What would Andy Rooney say.’ He took ideas from the Common Sense pool and turned them upside down which, sooner or later offended nearly everyone. In his own, self-assuming style he insulted or provoked people of every color and ethnicity, every LGBT, every belief. The network pulled him off the air but their audience switched to another channel until they reinstated Andy, which they always did. In hindsight, what separated Andy from Bill O’Reilly and Bill Maher was that the pundits spoke from their own self appointed authority, “Believe me, I know!” but Andy kept asking, “How does this work?” Andy wasn’t selling a canned belief system or an unholy scheme, he was sharing his search for possibility and meaning. When his readers swamped him with complaints he responded with; “When so many of your friends disagree with you so strongly it must be time to rethink your own position.” His disclaimers and apologies were pointed and contrite. When he redefined his thinking and apologized it was convincing, not the (Maher/O’Reilly) double talk that changed the subject without addressing the issue. 
Andy Rooney surfaced at the peak of white male privilege and that explains a lot. It was a cultural constant, like the air we breathe and our mother’s embrace. I came along twenty years later and to some extent we stumbled over that same self serving prejudice and we both asked similar questions like, “What is wrong here?” Finding fault within one’s own peer group is difficult and challenging it in public is asking for a rebuke. If for no other reason, I liked Andy. On his best day he reasoned that he could be wrong, that he was often wrong and that occupying a credible balance was preferable to the comfort of partisan privilege. 
My reading list now includes scholars like Yuval Harari (Sapiens) and Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind). I never needed convincing but human’s evolutionary history and behavior patterns fix us well within the animal kingdom. We are animals, no less than pelicans, whales and monkeys. What makes us really, really special are the tools in our tool box and a creative imagination. We can leapfrog straight away from raw instinct to creatures with language and story. With Story, humans can self identify in time and space, reflect on the past and ponder what comes next.  Humans have been begging the same insightful questions all along; where did we come from, how did we get here and why? 
Paleolithic humans were smart as can be but they didn’t know their own backstory (evolution) and their most scientific tool was the naked eye. So they made up Stories that they could understand. It had to make sense of a complicated, dangerous world. We call those primitive stories, ‘Myth’. In that complicated, dangerous world the most important knowledge and skill set dictated how to survive, replicate and reproduce; how not to go extinct. From mountains to seashore, culture to culture, different groups of people did survive and reproduce sufficiently. We are the flesh & blood evidence. What Harari points out is: People don’t all share the same myth, they never have. But if their Story works (perpetuating the generation to generation survival of the species) it doesn’t matter. 
Harari has opened Pandora’s box. Take every mythical belief and the behaviors they provoke, put it together with how those groups conform and consider what they think it means. That would be their collective Story. All of it: what you experience, how it affects individuals, the clan or tribe over the short term and/or the long haul, how people connect Cause and Effect relationships, what they reject and what they believe, it is their Story. Remember that one tribe’s Story could be very different than another tribe’s Story. Environmental features and conditions affect everything in the human saga. Climate, availability of food and water, dangerous predators, competing with other tribes, etc. Altogether in a well framed Story that has taken, (who knows how many) generations to formalize into myth, your Story (history, beliefs & behavior) doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work (replicate, reproduce, carve its own niche in the environment and sustain the species.) Your Story doesn't have to be true, it just has to work. 
Speaking for myself, Harari’s ‘It Only Has To Work’ observation is a profound revelation. I am not selling his book or professing my discipleship but the door has opened and the tide has turned in my thinking. E.O.Wilson (R.I.P.) condensed the idea down into a simple sentence: “The trouble with Homo sapiens is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” So said, I want to follow up on that idea as I move on into 2023. I can refer to this January 7, 2023 post and move on with the premiss, It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work.