A Plaque Upon Your House

We cannot relive the past so this moment and the next one and the one after that and this one right here and the one that's going to happen now...you get the picture. Anything that you wish could have happened to you can happen to you right now. It doesn't start with tomorrow or some wonderful time when you'll have all the time in the world in the future. It starts now.

That's all there is to living. Every successful person will tell you that's why s/he excels - live every moment to the fullest, with no regrets and no wishful thinking. The definition of "fullest" is up to you and you only.

Read that last paragraph over and over again - you'll save yourself thousands of dollars in "motivational" lectures, CDs, books and other repetitions on that theme. I've seen too many people in my life want to sell me the secret to life, or their secret version of life, only to find out they have no secret. It's something innate to our existence. Every living thing lives in the moment. Only we humans have complicated the matter and envisioned these things called past and future.

When I was a child, I followed the directions of the adults around me, uncertain why my personal view and inner vision didn't mesh with their spoken views of the world. By following them, I hiked the Appalachian Trail, spent weeks and weekends at Camp Davy Crockett and eventually collected enough points on the adults' scorecard of my outdoor (and partially indoor) activities that I earned the Eagle Scout Award in 1976 when I was 13 years old. Two plaques hang on the wall in front of me, one which points out I was "desiring to continue to promote, support and apply Scouting ideals through service" and thus "hereby recognized by the National Eagle Scout Association as a member in good standing," and the other plaque issued by the Colonial Heights Optimist Club "in recognition of your achievement of the rank of Eagle Scout. Your effort indicates to members of this Optimist club your level of good citizenship and character."

I still have all my uniforms, including the one I wore as an Explorer Scout with the patches from my time at the National Scout Jamboree in 1977. I have my scorecards, too. I earned my first merit badge on my first day as a Boy Scout, getting a 76 on the First Aid merit badge test, with 75 being a passing score, by putting my Cub Scout first aid knowledge into immediate use, even though the person giving the test felt like I should have taken his First Aid class like the rest of the Boy Scouts in the room.

I cannot go back in time and relive a past where I would tell the adults around me that the whole time I was going through the Scouting program, I never once felt like I deserved what the adults kept giving me. Like the First Aid merit badge example above, sometimes it was just too easy.

Also, I wasn't so sure about the oaths I had to keep reciting. I knew most of the kids in the packs/troops/patrols to which I belonged - they seemed to take the oaths to heart and put them into practice. We boys knew right away the "other" kids who weren't practicing the letter and spirit of the oaths. In fact, we often overheard the adults tell each other that they'd make sure those kids weren't going to make it to Eagle Scout. So, with keen observation, I kept my personal beliefs and visions to myself, so that I could stay on the path designated for me by the adults in my life.

Second of all, I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. In those past moments, like this one now, I was content observing and postulating, not having to generate any action to indicate my intent.

In other words, I was driven by my vision and didn't know it. What was the vision I first saw when I five years old? Well, since it's my personal vision that has led me to riches untold, making me a millionaire in 2006, I'll gladly sell it to you for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, satisfaction guaranteed. If you order in the next two seconds, you'll get it free. Ooh, too bad! Two seconds just passed by, didn't they? lol

But seriously, folks...for instance, take my wife. Please!*

[*Ode to Henny Youngman and David Young]

I've already told you my vision, I'm sure, well articulated in my favorite Chinese fortune cookie saying, "Life is a grand comedy to your sense of humor."

Plenty of you had the same vision so you can skip this paragraph if you've thought this, too. When I was five years old, I was sitting in a Sunday school class (for those who don't know the phrase "Sunday school class," it's a place where a relatively young parent sits down with his or her kid and other children her kid's age and discusses the relevance of a religious text to the daily life of a child). My parents had already gone over the lesson the Sunday school teacher was going to cover so I had read more than just the one Bible verse the class was going to discuss and had a vague understanding of the context of the verse (one of the Jesus parables). The teacher began by asking how many kids had memorized the verse. All of the kids except me raised my hand. The teacher asked me why I hadn't memorized the verse. I explained that I had spent the time she expected me to memorize one verse by reading the whole parable and the one after it. The teacher chided me for not following directions. She then had the kids recite the verse. The children around me smiled in conspiratorial satisfaction that they had one-upped me. I opened the Bible and read the section before the parable, seeing if there was something I was missing - nope, Jesus didn't tell his disciples to memorize what he was about to say. After the recital, the teacher described an elaborate story about a child and then at the end of the story repeated the Bible verse, putting it completely out of context to the story Jesus was telling in the Bible. It was at that point I had my first "vision." I call it a vision because it was the first time I could remember having an important thought that seemed out of context to the situation I was in. I have these visions all the time. We all do (at least I hope you do, unless you're the robot computer doing nothing else but exactly recording these words).

What was my first vision? People follow and give directions because they don't want to bother thinking about life from moment to moment.

Don't get me wrong. You can reach success in whatever you do by following directions. I've met lawyers and doctors who rarely stop to think for themselves but rely instead on their vast sum of memorized knowledge to dispense justice and drugs. When they act that way, I treat them like the successful robots they want to be. For those who open their mouths and declare themselves independent humans despite the labels on their lapels, they get my full attention.

I'm not asking you to think for yourself, telling you to think for yourself, or following you if you think for yourself. However, I'm thinking for myself in this moment. It's been my MO (modus operandi) since I was old enough to think for myself, and so far it has worked for me (should I say mindlessly so?). And when I think, I laugh at my friends, Irony and Regret, telling them silently that I only live in the moment. And that has made all the difference.*

[*Ode to Robert Frost]