though we take turns with the existential questions of life, he is the one who asks most of the ones – aloud – that are -sometimes annoyingly – foggy. the kinds of questions that require lengthy, long-winded, circular, pondering dissertations, steeped-in-wisdom-devoid-of-wisdom yada-yada, first-person-experience tales, prolonged dialogue, yin-yanging polar opinions, all the reddiwip of solid answers.
i find myself – in these moments – thinking of the practical, the reassuringly tactile, the basic. the homemade chicken soup.
in looking for a word to describe him, i stumbled across “erudite”. now, this isn’t in my normal vocabulary…i would have said “cerebral” or “in his head”…but “erudite” (syn: learned, scholarly, well-educated, knowledgeable, well-read, well-versed, well-informed, cultivated, civilized, intellectual) fits. yup. yup.
an early morning this week, as he was drinking his coffee, he was staring into space. i asked him what he was thinking about and he told me that it was “a deep rabbit hole” and went on to recount a bit of a book he had read about how our society had been built on henry ford’s assembly line innovation and how that applied to today and our country and the work he is doing and…
it was not quite 6am. pillow talk.
i knew i was wide-eyed, but it wasn’t – necessarily – with fascination.
he asked what i was thinking about as i sipped my -thankgoodnessforit- bold black coffee. i said, “cleaning the bathroom before the plumber gets here.”
he brought his synopsis of the book-bit to a close, postulating a few questions about society in these times.
i said, “i’m gonna swiffer too.”
6am.
though we get there from slightly different places, we usually arrive together. my ever-threading-heart and list-making-practical-feet-on-the-ground self arrives, swiffer and camera and pad and pencil in hand and his heady-thinker-visionaryish-philosophical self gets there, abstruse questions and positivities in tow.
it shows that yes…there are no simple answers, really. there are complex questions. and many ways to get to the answers. oftentimes, well, people in relationship get there differently.
i always want to bring home the zen from a trip. i want to wrap in it, the images from the adventures, the feelings it all gave me and not let it go. i want to evade the stresses that tend to consume all of us.
do i really think that is entirely possible? no. not entirely. life is life and it’s the whole kit-n-kaboodle. i just wanna know that we’re both holding onto that zen, keeping it close at hand. i don’t reeeeally wanna hear about our toolbox of potentiality.
my poppo would likely have agreed with sue aikens. he was a solution-finder. i will, right-here-and-now, brag about his ability to fix absolutely anything; he would find a way, even if he had to make it up. well, mostly because he made it up.
i’m not sure how he learned everything he learned; his knowledge base was incredibly practical. give him any problem and it became a challenge for him – an undertaking he never-ever thought of as insurmountable…it was simply a solution he hadn’t yet found. and so, i hear sue aikens (of national geographic’s life below zero fame – living a solitary life out on the arctic, solving problems i will likely never encounter) and i think of my dad, whose list of favorite places on earth included his workbench out in the garage (or in the basement in earlier years when they lived up north.) he saved every screw and nut and bolt and tool that crossed his path “just in case”. he was a re-purposer before it was vogue. and he was an expert at turning cardboard boxes inside out or fashioning a new box from old in order to ship or store any thing. his rube goldberg fixes were always pretty amusing, but they all worked and i can hear him in my head pondering and strategizing when i look at something-that-needs-fixing. sue aikens would be proud. her glass-half-full attitude is pretty amazing, considering the elements she deals with. she’s pretty black and white about things; a lack of grey is something i can’t really relate to, but maybe that’s why she solves things more easily – she doesn’t get lost in any part of the emotional response to the problem.
i have to say, though, that i wish i could look at problems in the same positive way as sue. yes, yes, yes, i know how much we all grow from problems and solving problems and blahblahblah. it’s the stress of problems i’m talking about…the worry. there was a prayer yesterday in the bulletin that said, “help us resist the reflex to worry constantly about every single detail of our lives…” wow. i double that. mmm. make that triple. it is a reflex. we know that the moments beyond problems will come. more than likely we will be on the other side sometime soon, sitting in the middle of the solution and looking back, shaking our heads at how befuddled and stressed we felt. but in the meantime….
in the meantime, i would like a collection of some straight-up solutions for the problems that lurk…a (metaphoric) closet full of how-to-do-its or at least how-to-make-it-ups. oh, and a better attitude about problems. they are just solutions we haven’t found yet.
reverse threading 