CHALLENGING BUT ATTAINABLE

Approaching the Tee Box, Archdale, NC

One of my favorite definitions I have always liked to use and repeat regarding forecasting and personal improvement goals is that they are thoughtfully considered to be “challenging but attainable”.  And it’s interesting how many things in life this can affect.  One of the main attractions of the game of golf is that it so imitates life itself and can never be perfected.  I’ve commented many times that if the game were easy, we’d quickly lose interest.  Nobody can accuse the game of life as easy.  Maybe that’s why?  If you’ve ever lost interest in life, such as during a pandemic lockdown, consider if you’re not challenging yourself enough. 

As I’ve advanced through the many stages of life and aging, this truism has been reinforced many times over.  A child’s ten-piece puzzle isn’t much of a challenge compared to a puzzle of one thousand pieces.  If the final conquest of holing a putt was into a one-foot diameter hole, the skill and attention to putting would most certainly be diminished.

One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movie lines is that “a man’s got to know his limitations.”  I ran cross country in high school.  If you ever see me running these days, you’d better join me!  I work out at the gym (in better times), but I do not join the gym rats in their routines.  That’s why we now have multiple tee boxes on a golf course.  Many courses no longer label them as women’s, senior’s, flat belly’s, etc.  The tees are colored differently and the score cards simply state the total course length from each color.  You choose which tee is “challenging but attainable” for your game in time.  At yesterday’s PGA championship one of the pro golfers hit a five iron 250 yards!  Before I switched my five iron to a hybrid club, I hit that club 150 yards.  That’s why he plays from the back tees and I play much further up to keep it real!    

All of life is a circle, sunrise to sunset, season to season.  We start moving back to the longer tee boxes as we progress in the game and then we gradually begin to move back up as the gift of time passes.  It’s called growing up in the game and then growing old gracefully, while we’re still in the game.  

 

APPROACHING LIFE PHILOSOPHICALLY

Auschwitch, Internet Domain

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.  And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.  History has stopped.  Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”  --George Orwell, 1984

All human beings share a common desire for meaning.  Did you choose to be born?  Neither did anyone else!  Jean-Paul Sartre reasoned that once born we are “condemned to be free”.  But with freedom comes responsibility.   And even when restrained, we always have the freedom regarding how we respond to circumstances.  Pragmatism teaches that we all have the capacity to strive to make things better in life, even though we will never achieve perfection.  We may be terribly restrained in life, but we have the freedom to act well.  Compassion for a child, animal or forest comes from being aware that we’re all interconnected.

No single role such as our jobs, our relationship status, our political views, our philosophical views, etc. can ever define a person since we are always changing.  Our elders teach us that you can never cross the same river twice because by the time you cross again, both you and the river have changed.  Aristotle encouraged his students to strive for success but acknowledge that external forces can inhibit that progress.  Hedonic calculus predicts whether something will be pleasurable in the long run or not, e.g., drinking beer all evening (short term pleasure or long-term pain) or studying at a university (short term pain for long term gain).  Actually, I was able to validate both examples on my way to achieving both of my degrees!

St. Augustine reminds us that the presence of evil gives us a perspective on those things that are good, e.g., a long harsh winter gives us a much greater appreciation for the warming spring.  A visiting tourist at the preserved Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz asked a guide why the locals hadn’t simply burned such a terrible place to the ground after the prisoners had been freed.  He replied that it had been discussed but after thoughtful consideration they wanted to preserve this place of horror as a reminder to the world that the events which created it would never be repeated.   Hate has created many problems in our history but has never solved any yet.   

 

THE QUENTIN QUARANTINO LOCKDOWN BLUES

Stay Home Ticket

Now that the Coronavirus self-isolating routine has grimly settled into the heat and humidity of the long hot summer of 2020, the promise of a viable vaccine in record time by year’s end is a small distant thread to hold onto.  The Quentin Quarantino Lockdown Blues is comfortably settling into most living rooms around the world but we will persevere with the assist of all those creative folks out there with a sense of humor.  One sage wrote that “we can all agree that in 2015 not a single person got the answer to ‘where do you see yourself 5 years from now.’”  

A quick check of all the social media outlets where we now have time to burn reveals lots of quirky material.  Unfortunately, some have discovered that years like 2020 last for an entire year!  This has prompted many city dwellers to throw open their windows and shout “I’m tired of 2020 and I won’t take it anymore!”  A quick check of video clips from the 1976 movie “Network” has a Deja vu fact check that the world hasn’t improved much since then.  Peter Finch’s character, a veteran news anchorman who discovers that he’s losing his job, goes off with “We know things are bad - worse than bad, They're crazy! It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms.’”

As the boredom sets in, it has been observed that many children are named after places where conception occurred with names like Paris, etc., so we can now expect a lot of babies soon with names like Quarantine, etc.  Another deep thinker has raised a very pertinent question, asking “Has anybody let the Amish know what’s going on?”  And someone else pleads to “whoever started your game of Jumanji in January please finish it ASAP!”

Bored homebodies are starting to alphabetize their medicine cabinets.  A frequent flyer road warrior who is missing the airport destination codes like LAX and ORD has devised codes for our current travels like LVG, BTH, and MBR for living room, bath room and master bed room.  One meticulous housewife detailed a seven-day menu of “steak, burgers, spaghetti, Ramen, creamed corn, road kill squirrels, and dried grass with clover salad.” 

And folks are getting just more than a little irritated with celebrities being tested without even having symptoms while most are told to stay home and wash their hands all day.  We’re advised that the best way to get tested is to cough near a celebrity and wait.  While we’re on the subject, everyone is just about up to here with these millionaires living in West Coast McMansions singing “Imagine” on social media and lamenting that “we’re all in this together”. If this quarantine is the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do in life, you haven’t had a very hard life.

Finally, there’s an account of a nurse trying to comfort a man who’s coming out of a six-month coma as he slowly says, “Man, I can’t wait to go to a baseball game!”  Given the current dearth of sports on TV this weekend, I’ll be watching the World Origami Championships on Paperview. 

HEAVENLY SIGNS

TOTAL ECLIPSE, NASA

COMET, HUBBLE

COMET NEOWISE, ISS

The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic infected an estimated 500 million people and resulted in 50 million deaths.  Since that occurred just over 100 years ago, there aren’t many people around today that have any memory of that horrific time in human history.  None of us today that are experiencing the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown have ever experienced this massive effort to slow its progress from host to host in our cultures.  Now that we’re entering the second half of the year 2020, this isolation of relational beings is beginning to take its toll along with the virus.  Combined with an extremely contentious major election year, the old adage that if it happens now, it’s political!

The very destructive riots in many of our major cities that have hijacked peaceful American protests for cultural change are no doubt being fueled by unemployed people with too much time on their hands.  The Atlantic hurricane season is now fully underway with the first landfall in southern Texas.  High heat and humidity in the heart of the summer season grips much of the nation.  All of this troubling activity combined with the serious implications of not opening our schools and businesses has people looking for answers. 

 It's been said that when humans do not understand something, they generally react in one of two ways—they either fear it or worship it.  That certainly goes for heavenly signs in the skies above us.  Two very obvious happenings in both day and night time relate to total eclipses of the sun and the seeming random appearance of bright tailed comets streaking across the horizon.  The planet has witnessed total eclipses every 177 days somewhere including December 26, 2019 and June 21, 2020.  Comet Neowise was first seen by astronomers on March 27, 2020 and its 70-day observation arc will be lost to the human eye before the end of July.  It isn’t forecast to return until the year 8786. 

 Although we now know that an eclipse is a natural phenomenon, many cultures have attributed them to supernatural causes and bad omens.  An ancient Greek battle between the Medes and the Lydians was being waged when a total solar eclipse darkened the battlefield.  Both sides immediately lowered their weapons and declared peace!  The ancients also regarded comets as omens of disaster and messengers of the gods.  These celestial nomads have been blamed for some of history’s darkest times from England’s Black Death to Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas in South America!

So, are all of these signs attempting to attract our attention?  Have we all been sent to our rooms by divine command to reconsider the direction of our lives and that of our planet?  Are these extraordinary happenings one last chance to reconcile our place in the universe and resolve to live together in peace?  

SACRED HOOP

SACRED HOOP

“And while I stood there, I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”  –Lakota native American, Black Elk Speaks

The Medicine Wheel, sometimes known as the Sacred Hoop, has been used by generations of various Native American tribes for health and healing. It embodies the Four Directions, as well as Father Sky, Mother Earth, and Spirit Tree.

 

“As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces…each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel...they would go in any one of the four directions…and all four rims were full of eyes all around.”  --Ezekiel 1:15-18

Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota native Indian who lived around the turn of the twentieth century and had the sad experience of watching his people’s way of life decimated in his lifetime in exile.  Ezekiel was a priest and prophet to the Israelites in Babylonian exile around six hundred BC after the Babylonians defeated Israel.

 Both of these favored men experienced visions of hope for divine intervention to unite all people.  And it was communicated in the form of a sacred hoop or medicine wheel. 

TRUTH TO SELF

Truth, Olin Levi Warner

Mankind has progressed through many stages in our development including the hunter-gather age, the agrarian age, the industrial age and now the information age.  I think its safe to say that we’re now deep into the digital information age and our lives are overwhelmed with information that we sort into our true and false in boxes.  At no time in our existence does this become more apparent than during an election year—the year 2020 that we would all probably like to request a do-over! 

Solomon was one of the wisest human beings to ever live and he assembled a book of wise sayings called Proverbs, including Proverbs 12:17

“He who speaks truth tells what is right, but a false witness, deceit.”

The sculpture of Truth depicts Truth holding a mirror in one hand up to a snake in the other.  Snakes have historically been associated with some of mankind’s oldest rituals representing the dual expressions of good and evil.  Which will be rightly reflected?  Its important to note that believing a statement doesn’t make it true.  Thomas Aquinas succinctly stated that “Truth is the conformity of the intellect and things.”

David Eagleman writes in his book Incognito that mankind had believed the earth was the center of all creation around which all things revolved until Galileo Galilei peered into a telescope that he had designed in 1610.  Galileo observed that Jupiter had three moons that revolved around the planet, giving rise to multiple centers.  Instead of receiving his just accolades this genius was brought before an Inquisition and placed in shackles on a dungeon floor.  Not everyone appreciated the new found truth.

Eagleman follows this remarkable story by introducing us to the newly found truth that “we’ve been knocked from our perceived position at the center of ourselves, quoting Carl Jung, ‘In each of us there is another whom we do not know.’  Or as Pink Floyd put it ‘There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.’” 

The latest revelation in brain science is that our subconscious efficiently controls the majority of our response to our existence while our consciousness is “far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.”

FEATHERS ON THE WIND

Airborne Coronavirus

There’s a lot of debate out there right now about the efficacy of wearing a face mask out in public to help slow the spread of COVID-19 virus.  A retail health greeter who recently asked a customer to wear one was stabbed in response!  There’s still a lot we don’t understand about how this virus spreads, but scientists now believe that viral particles encapsulated in a droplet of saliva or mucus can attach to a host cell and infect the person.  Unseen tiny airborne bioaerosols simply released through exhalation can spread the disease—like opening a bag of feathers that randomly scatter in the air.  It would seem that these masks are more useful to keep infected people from spreading the virus.  How much virus a person must breath to get infected isn’t known.  Infection from touching surfaces in now considered not to be a major risk and the virus primarily moves from host to host.

The very nature of this relatively unseen and still not totally understood virus taps into the human psyche as something to be feared, challenged or worshipped.  It would seem that the older generation rightly fears the consequences while the “immortal” younger generation challenges it. 

David Eagleman in his book, Incognito, relates the story of a man who wanted to record for posterity some of the most important music ever to come out of Africa using a tape recorder.  He got into immediate trouble when he played the music back to a native who thought his tongue had been stolen!  The quick-thinking man saved his own life by producing a mirror to confirm that the tongue was still intact.  Eagleman notes that “A vocalization seems ephemeral and ineffable: it is like opening a bag of feathers which scatter on the breeze and can never be retrieved.  Voices are weightless and odorless, something you cannot hold in your hand.”    

This virus, like our voice, is unseen, but unlike our voice that moves to others’ auditory systems, the virus moves to others’ respiratory systems and can be deadly for thousands of people on the planet.  And even though many remain skeptical due to its unseen nature, they need to understand that like our voices it travels on our breath like feathers on the wind.