29. I've heard it said, "If you only know how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Sometimes I see this principle, so to speak, at work broadly in humanity. Our strength as a species, I think, involves two advantages: our opposable thumbs and our ability to analyze observations and abstract concepts from their situational context. We can imagine. Watching a friend killed by a beast, for example, we can feel sadness at the loss of the loved one and imagine a world in which the friend is still alive, a world in which we rescued that friend, for example. We can experience, from those imaginings, a modicum of the relief and joy such a situation would create were it real. We can imagine things to be better (or worse) than they are. Sometimes I feel, however, that we over-apply this skill. We have abstracted ourselves out of contact with our physical context. We have created a dream world. We are always so surprised when the physical world, which we pretend is not there any more, asserts its relevance and presence to us.
Don't get me wrong. I am not prophesying doom nor am I chastising humanity for its sins. We are as we are, and we seem to be doing well. We have psychologists and meteorologists to help us remember and deal with the world outside our heads, to abstract it more accurately. Nevertheless, when I have to explain to bewildered children that humans started fishing because we needed food to survive, that we didn't always just hook and release in a cruel mockery of traditional survival, I wonder at our detachment from what it takes to live. We are broken animals, I think, but it's okay. One day the real world will blink away and we will fold into the blinding illumination of ideas and memories. One day the world will slip out from under our unopposable opposable thumb.
Until then I am comforted by thoughts, as I've probably told you before, like Mary Oliver's from her poem Wild Geese:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Hello, friends. Tell me what's happening.
Later. Love.
P. S. - I know the last few of these haven't been very "About Me," but I can't help it. I can only stay grounded for so long. I am, as I said yesterday, floating a little. I'll try to remain true to the spirit of the exercise, but I'm in no position to make guarantees, being not in control of things. Thanks for stopping by.
