It occurs to me…

“Action will remove the doubt that theory cannot solve.”  Tehyi Hsieh

I ran across this quote today.  It occurs to me that much time in life is spend wondering, even when the answer can be known fairly easily, and at minimal risk/cost – but it requires action.  What comes to mind here is the dilemma I had recently when a smoke alarm in the house was chirping, telling me it needed a new battery.  I had one replacement 9 volt battery (those rectangular ones with two posts at the top) in my box-o-batteries, but it was out of the package so I didn’t know if it was any good. – so I wondered.  I had nothing else to stick it in other than said smoke alarm mounted on the ceiling.  I tried to remember when I might have bought the battery, why it was not in the package, and what implication that had.  I looked for dates on the battery itself and found none.  Ultimately, I just decided to use my education as a child.  I put my tongue on the two battery posts.  It gave me a good jolt – thus validating the quote: “Action will remove the doubt that theory cannot solve.”

I got the ladder and replaced the old battery with that one.

“Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”  Justice Felix Frankfurter

I ran across this quote again today.  It always seems to show up at an opportune time, a time when I am rethinking or reassessing something.  But it occurs to me that perhaps that rethinking and reassessing is (or should be) a perpetual state.  There are, of course, some absolutes in life, but many thoughts and beliefs I have today I will not have (or will have the counter of) tomorrow, next year, or three, eight, thirteen, or twenty-one years from now.  I know that to be true because it has been true in history and in my life.  The world is not flat.  Men can fly with the aid of machinery.  Images and sound can be transmitted through air…..

The difficulty with tardy wisdom is not simply the tardiness.  There is other fallout associated with the tardiness, with changing one’s mind (in modern political parlance, “flip-flopping”).  And then, of course, pride is at play here.  Wisdom often carries with it the duty to reject previously held ways of thinking and take back previous expressions offered as absolute truths.

For whatever reason, or combination of reasons, I know the urge, my urge, is almost always to resist that wisdom Frankfurter speaks of.  Rarely, if ever, does someone present to me a new way of doing/seeing things and I just slap my forehead, wonder how I could have been so stupid not to have seen it before, and embrace the new thought.  That is probably too much to hope for.  Perhaps I can just stick with Frankfurter’s suggestion and consider that wisdom keeps no time and has no calendar.

My first memory of watching Astros baseball goes back to a trip to the Astrodome with my cousin and my uncle Dick sometime around 1965, perhaps 1966, which would have been the year or year after it was built.  Since them I have ridden the roller coaster that was/is Astros baseball.  I have seen them suck, I mean really suck.  I have seen them be really good.  I have seen them through multiple 100 game loss seasons, and seen them get close to, but not get in to, the World Series, until 2005.  I saw, as in I was there, when they lost Game 4 in 2005, being swept by the White Sox.  And then, there was this year.  After all the disappointment, it was hard to believe – it IS hard to believe.

As I look back at my half a century run with the Astros, it is, in many ways, difficult to even understand what has occurred, particularly after being sleep deprived for the past couple of weeks from watching games.  But what I understand a little better now is that time is the answer to lots of questions, and that time is set to a clock that is not necessarily my own.  I’ve known (but not liked) that all along, of course – but I must be reminded of it on a regular basis.

Photo taken in San Antonio on a golf course earlier this year.

I found myself reading today from Luke 14:15-24, the Parable of the Great Banquet.  A man throws a banquet and all on his guest list come up with excuses not to attend – so he sends his folks out into the street to “go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” to attend the banquet.

I won’t pretend to fully understand this parable – yet – but this occurred to me.  I have a tendency to associate with people who think, act, and look like me – we seem to think of that as a “natural” bias, but on reflection, there is little “natural” in that.  We do that by programming, not by natural selection.  A blind person is not blind by choice, nor a poor person, a lame person.  A black person, a brown person, a white person – none are the color they are by choice.  And interestingly, as we each associate in our respective groups, we all see each other as “normal” – because we all ARE normal (whatever the hell “normal” is).

It is time to widen the circle.  Each of us can be a benefactor, a student, a teacher of the other – if we open our hearts and minds and allow that to occur.  That is, of course, a big IF.

Reading today from an essay by Charles Krauthammer, he notes: “[I]t is hard for anyone to apprehend the sheer felicity of one’s own time until it is gone.”  This seems (though Krauthammer might not appreciate the analogy) to be the same sentiment as Joni Mitchell’s song: “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.  They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

From whichever author, I appreciate the sentiment.  It is indeed difficult, perhaps impossible, to fully appreciate the ups and downs of life events while in their midst.  It is only, after the ride, looking back and seeing the roller coaster, that one can – if then — fully appreciate the ups and downs, the twists and turns, that were somehow negotiated.  It is then, I guess, when I am provided with the choice between pride and humility, between patting myself on the back and muttering the line from the Kris Kristofferson tune: “Why me, Lord.  What have I ever done, to deserve even one, of the pleasures I’ve known?”

“I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.”

Ashleigh Brilliant

I ran across this quote today and it caused me to chuckle – though the sentiment is quite serious.  It of course reminded me of Matthew 6:34: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Indeed, “each day has enough trouble of its own,” but while “several days [may] attack me at once,” I need not invite but one day at a time in for a visit – though I do, in a perverted way, seem to enjoy the company.

I don’t much care for reading about writing – and my writing likely reflects that.  But recently I stumbled across a blog post (Reditus) by Amanda Mininger that struck a chord and sent me to the keyboard I have been most recently associating only with work.

She notes that when we write we “peer down the silent well.  What’s down there?  What have I been overlooking?  What roots cling with naked tenacity to the stone sides?  What thin layer of much at the bottom hides an ecosystem….  What hides in the cracks unbidden?  I don’t know yet.  I can’t see.  My eyes need time to adjust.”  I like that analogy.  Writing often feels like “peer[ing] down the silent well.”  Continuing, she notes, properly so, that when I feel that tug there is something, often something I can’t even  assign a name to that “has not let go yet.  Has chained itself to my ankle, has let me drag it down the street into my apartment and on vacation and into work meetings and into lazy Sunday breakfasts where I can continue to ignore it, and ignore it, and ignore it if I want to….  But if I say it here – I’m coming back to writing – maybe the chain will break.”

So here I sit at the keyboard, ball and chain unattached – for now.  But the well is always close, the drink so refreshing.

Uncertainty

“When we are not sure, we are alive.”  Graham Greene

I ran across this quote today then, on to Friedrich Nietzsche (you know you are in trouble when you identify with a Nietzsche quote): “What we find here is still the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things.”

So, to wash that out, this from Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

It occurs to me that uncertainty may be a better companion than certainty — though it rarely feels that way.

Onward to the day!