NIMB

When do we embrace our place in the universe,

rather than pretend we are apart from it?

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In class yesterday, I talked with the students/ customers about the 10,000 hour rule, recently revived by Malcolm Gladwell in his book describing outliers.

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I think some of them understood the concept - that you set aside time first for yourself and then for others. In that personal time, you concentrate your efforts (physical and/or mental) on what and who you want to enhance. You may want to be a better religious adherent. You may want to be a better parent. You may want to be the best peashooter on your block. It doesn't matter what you choose. The point is that to reach the goal of being the best, you generally spend 10,000 hours on your efforts and you will find yourself at the top of your game, no matter what it is, given that you understood your limitations in relation to your goal. For instance, a person who stands a little over 4 feet tall (1.25 meters) as an adult will probably never excel in professional basketball in the center position but may hold the record for most consecutive free throws made.
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How long do we have to live a basic life before we excel as integral parts of a whole?

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I wandered the woods behind my house this morning, seeking the first blooms of shooting stars (Dodecatheon meadia) for this season. In my meandering, I found redbud (Cercis canadensis), waterleaf (Phacelia bipinnatifida), Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) and trout lily (Erythronium albidum).

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Birds, butterflies, bees, flies, gnats, ants, spiders, snails, and other fauna flourish in the northern Alabama woods this time of year. I saw scat and other signs of nocturnal animals. Occasionally, I smelled the sleeping/breeding quarters of unidentified animals. Mostly, my nose was overwhelmed by the scent of cut grass and spring onions wafting over the woodland air from domesticated ground covered in a monoculture of untasty monocotyledonous green plants (that's a mouthful, eh?) from nearby habitation quarters of Homo sapiens domesticus.

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In the distance, the sounds of hammering and mowing ensured I did not fully escape into the belief that I was alone in the world. Under my feet, primarily dry ground, a concern to me this early in the year. The drought of recent years has reduced the trillium and mayapple populations and has not yet disappeared, despite recent rains.

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Yesterday, my students/customers noticed a tone in my demeanor. I brushed it off as my possibly having caught a cold. In fact, I felt sad and was in physical pain as well. I thought of Helen in the silence - any connection? Does she think about me anymore? I don't know. Our lives were cemented a long time ago. We accepted the separate family invitations to walk paths clearly marked for easy, successful sojourns in the first 45 years of our lives. What now? As individuals, who were once conjoined, what have we become?

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I pondered these questions as I sat at the junction of the Huntsville Library and Embassy Suites and looked at the traffic circle in between the two, while waiting on my wife, who was closing up her booth for the day at the craft show in the Von Braun Center. Before I left the house to pick her up, I had just watched a middle portion of the movie, "Grosse Point Blank," which brought forth thoughts of smiles and laughter buried deep inside my labyrithine brain.

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My dear, dear friend, Helen, what has became of you?* I still don't know what I meant to you. At one point, you were everything to me, our limits not a hindrance but a fun set of games to play. If only you didn't want kids. But what would the world be without your Christy? I do not know. I wish I understood the desire to have kids and raise them. So far, all of us exist only because of reproduction. You have given the world more than I'll ever understand. I'll forever have us in these words. You have more than me.

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[*Ode to Pink Floyd's "The Wall"]

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I wandered the woods today, in search of something more than a blooming plant. I sought sanctuary. I sought peace. I sought but knew I would not find. I did not want to find what I sought, for if I did, then my search would be over. Instead, in the silence, I heard a question hanging over my head - "Where do I belong?"

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As I jumped from rock to rock, as I placed each foot carefully like a monk not wanting to step on his ancestor, I slowly became aware of the meaning of the question. Only upon the return, after I stepped foot within the boundaries of my official place of civility, setting my body down on a plastic loveseat perched on a rock ledge in my backyard, did the question fill the landscape around me for full understanding.

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I belong nowhere and I belong everywhere. Thus, I will never find an exact spot to call my own. I am simply part of the universe. I am not the universe and the universe is not me. There is nothing for me to find and there is everything for me to find. I will spend my life seeking the answer to a question. With every answer, another question appears. There is no ultimate truth.

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Life is repetitive. Life is art. Have kids. Take care of your family. Life is chaos. Life is order. It is all the same and it is all different. We became a part of the universe before we were born. We were never apart from it.

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