Life Isn't Shaped Like a Baseball Bat. I hope.

I hope life isn't shaped like a baseball bat. A bat has a "sweet spot," the part of the bat a batter wants to hit the ball with to send it on a ride. The sweet spot is a small part of the bat, and if you are standing in the batter's box, you are using all the rest of the bat to try to connect the sweet spot with the ball.

If life is like that, then a whole lot of your life is spent trying to get to the sweet spot; the best part. This came up at dinner with friends the other night; not the baseball bat analogy itself, but the sweet spot. And why, when you find something great, a period of time at work, or life, does the sweet spot have to be finite? Why can't it be extended? Why are the best of days numbered? Looking back at 20-ish years working at the same place, one friend could pick out the best five or six years, which were towards the end of his time there, but didn't last beyond that time frame. Things change.

Life is not all about a job, I think many people will tell you--those with a family, hobbies, passions, a relationship. So maybe it is that careers are shaped like baseball bats? I don't know, I think we can all look back on our lives and find different times when things were cranking along as you'd want them. But invariably, life's sweet spots get superseded, or end, or maybe just change when we weren't looking.

Einstein was a pretty smart cat. Let's invoke him here:

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

Maybe that's the rub. That we expect things to stay the same. We expect to keep doing the same things, which seem to be working at the time, but that is only for a time, and we don't see the change coming. What was the sweet spot becomes a rut, a habit, when we aren't paying attention.

What's a good change metaphor? Let's go with water. Mankind dealing with change is like being in water. If you want to get beneath the surface, you can emulate the diver. Per Pablo Neruda:

Time after time
he takes hold of the water, the sand,
and is
born again.
Submerging
each day
to the hold
of the pitiless
current,
Pacific and
Chilean
cold,
the diver
must practice
his
birth again,
make  himself
monstrous
and tentative,
displace himself
fearfully,
grow wise
in his slothful
mobility, like
an underseas
moon.
Even
his thinking
must merge
with the water

Neruda was not kind to paper. But he was frequently on to things. His odes, love poems, and epic "Residence on Earth" are a man reckoning with life, existence, the Universe.

"Even his thinking must merge with water."  When the physicist and the poet say the same thing, it might be time to pay attention. Embrace change. Don't hold onto things for too long expecting them to stay the same. Merge our thinking with water.

Life doesn't have to be shaped like a baseball bat. If life is change, like water, maybe we can be the diver.

2014: From Residing to Embracing

I take stock on a reading rock, in the town where I grew up. It's a rock bulkheaded riverbank, looking onto a glassy December river. It's too cold to have to worry about snakes.

I came down to Oxford to take a particular photograph, which I have. Now I am in the gravy. Sitting along a river I have swum across on a bet; looking at a dock we jumped and swam off of as kids.

I am 42. At this time last year I was married and working as a government contracted technical writer in Washington, D.C. This year I am separated and between jobs. And I am happier than I have been in a long time. There are reasons for that, one of which is knowing myself and learning my heart. Another is returning to activities that make me feel alive. Last year I was sleepwalking through life; this year, I am awake.

Today I am a tourist in the town my father's family has lived for centuries. A backpack with books, a notebook, ski cap, snacks and water; taking pictures of things that catch my eye; walking streets and sidewalks and sitting cold to scrawl a note or contemplate a color. No two people would describe "brackish" in the same way.

This has been a difficult year in places. In March, I went on Zoloft to help me through the worst of it. I was worried it would change me, sap my creativity, hollow me out. It didn't. But I stopped taking it in October when I found myself too numb to life around me; not feeling enough. I don't regret either decision.

I have connected with new people and reconnected with others. Adversity can lead you to a clearer understanding of friendship, of family, and of who those folks are. I am finding, I think, that my way forward in life has rarely ever been a straight line; maybe a series of cutbacks and switchbacks and circling spirals, ultimately leading up the mountain.

I have too many blessings to count. Health, my own and my family's, and two honor roll student athlete daughters to whom I want to give the best life possible.

Tourist. Maybe that's my problem. I have been a tourist in my own life. I have not recognized enough the things, people, places that I love and committed to them. But that's changing.

Work. Passion. Love. Family. Art. Self reliance. Home. Pablo Neruda's epic autobiographical book/poem, written over the course of 20 years, is called "Residence on Earth." There is something to that notion: residing, inhabiting. But it sounds too passive. For me, I need the idea of engaging with others, activity. Maybe beyond engaging, it's actually embracing. Yeah, I think that's it.

Last year I was residing. This year I have started living. Now it is time to embrace.

Lost and Revealed

"Lost" was one of my favorite shows. A metaphysical mystery/thriller that revealed a little more each episode, but even as it revealed, it kept you off balance.

Lost is not however, one of my favorite places to be in life. I look for a familiar landmark, true north, a compass, a map, a guide, but then I realize I am a bit like Alice, unsure where it is I am trying to go.

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
- Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert and Dante share an address in the dark woods. I am starting to know them by sight and smell. I'm listening for the music, the kind that comes only from being in the woods.

In my teens I loathed peace symbols. Pacifism felt boring, stale. I don't know if I've ever drawn a peace symbol. But I spent years drawing anarchy symbols. They described the shape of my restless soul. Lately I have been binge watching "Sons of Anarchy," and rekindling my unrealistic, romantic love affair with anarchy. To hear Emma Goldman quoted,

Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals...

I am not deluded enough to think that anarchy is a way most people, myself included, would choose to live, any more than thinking chaos would be a fun way to be stuck in a shopping mall. But there is something to letting a natural order take shape, rather than feeling lost in a society that rarely seems to find worth in the things I've come to value. It's a dilemma.

Lost. That's the shape of trying to figure out love, vocation, passion, time, family, art, nature. It's the shape of being between. In flux. Maybe it's just a more honest description of how we always are, when not deluded into thinking we have things figured out. It's easy to think of these lost feeling times as a sort of existential intermission. But that discounts these days, this time. And it assumes that the next act is written already, somewhere to be found. There is just as good a chance it is yet to be written, still to be determined. Unless it is already written on the soul.

I've been reading around of late in Pablo Neruda's "Residence on Earth," and Jim Harrison's "The Shape of the Journey." Both books were written over decades or more. Harrison's is a new and collected poems. In "The Theory and Practice of Rivers" he discerns:

It is not so much that I got
there from here, which is everyone's
story: but the shape
of the voyage, how it pushed
outward in every direction
until it stopped:
roots of plants and trees,
certain coral heads,
photos of splintered lightning,
blood vessels,
the shapes of creeks and rivers.

Maybe that is why life is hard to pin down. Maybe that is why it is hard to know the soul. Because the shapes we understand are circles, squares, trapezoids if we want to get funky. But life might be more accurately shaped like creeks or rivers, which have always been some of my favorite shapes. I am reminded of their unique shapes when I am on a paddleboard or cruising or floating in a boat. Or sipping a beer or reading or writing or watching sunset from the shoreline.

Maybe the shape of our life isn't one we can predict, or map, maybe it is a shape that gets revealed, made clear, little by little. Season one of "Sons of Anarchy" ends with Jacks Teller walking through a graveyard over to his father's grave. The song that is playing is a spiritual old blues song, which is a favorite of mine, written by Blind Willie Johnson. It's called "John the Revelator." Maybe it's fitting, or telling, that it's written, sung, revealed by a man who was blind.

"And her marvelous stars expand"

I was floating on a raft with a half-full beer can in my hand. When I leaned my head back the tree branches and leaves mimicked the expanse of the stars. It was like they shared a set of opening wings. Of course, it could have been the beer...

"And her marvelous stars expand."

That's a line from Pablo Neruda. It opens itself up from within, "Residence on Earth," a book/extended meditation/extended poem that he wrote over the course of 20 years (1925-1945). He stopped writing it the year my mom was born.

But the night stars expanded this morning, when I read it, 65-plus years later. And they expanded back to last week, floating in the pool, thinking that same thing, but without giving it words, just awe, and a mental note.

Maybe Neruda is a time traveler, knowing that it might take him 20 years to let go of his poem, but that with it, its utterance, he might travel across decades or centuries.

Maybe it's just a service of the stars, flinging themselves out across the sky each night, like so much sand from a child's plastic shovel,

And by realizing that the stars are so much shovel-flung sand, and giving ourselves that scale in the scheme of things, we see that, smaller than sand, we can stand shoulder to shoulder with Neruda, separated by only a half-century, which is what, really?

Yeah, Neruda is a time traveler. He uses the stars, which he steps on, as they expand. But maybe it's the beer...