Like Butter

I once interviewed for a job in high school to be a lumberjack. Well, the suburban form of a lumberjack, anyway. I was applying for a job with a tree removal company. I would be trained to climb into the tree tops and remove limbs and overhangs. I had envisioned a summer of flannel shirts, hanging out with men who were so tough they could eat glass and me becoming the most storied and daring tree climber of the crew they had no choice but to accept me as their leader and captain, young though I was. During the interview there was a series of questions I had to answer and I could tell that I was answering the way I needed to in order to obtain the job. Then he hit me with the last question "Are you absent minded at all?" I paused and then stumbled in my answer and in that little hiccup I lost the job. The man looked at me and said "Listen, last year one of my guys left the cuff unbuttoned on his flannel shirt and the sleeve got caught in the mulcher and pulled him in. He died quickly but it was a mess." He forgot to button a sleeve. Those blasted flannel shirts.

Every instance of my parents pointing out the fact I had on two different socks or shoes before heading out to school, every forgotten homework assignment or test, and every blown stop sign and narrowly missed car accident began filling my thoughts. I was one of the most absent-minded people I knew. Perhaps a job consisting of killer falling limbs and mulching machinations of death was not the right career path for me.

The man interviewing me knew it, and I both knew it. I thanked him for his time and I left. That summer I continued working at the pool as a life guard. Sitting in the sun on a chair and focusing on one thing only- that was more up my alley.

Today, however, I find myself dividing my attentions more than ever. Between being a husband and father to three boys, I have taken on more professional responsibility than I ever have in the past. Because of my personal limitation, therefore, things fall apart. I may not leave the house with two different pairs of shoes on but there are too many days where I enter a public restroom at three in the afternoon and come to realize that I never combed my hair. Which is lucky for me because there is only a margin of difference between my hair combed and my hair un-combed.

Beyond issues of neglected cosmetics I find too many tasks left undone for far too long. I cannot catch up. I am perpetually apologizing to one person or another for some thing that is still not completed. I can hear the response to these facts in the form of an answer that is not ever quite as simple as it sounds: delegation. In my life, I often find that delegation is sometimes more work than doing the job yourself because delegation often requires some form of training and teaching. While I believe in training through doing there are times where there isn’t time.

So I find Bilbo Baggins a compelling figure when he says within Tolkien’s classic trilogy “I feel thin, sort of stretched…like butter scraped over too much bread.” I have found it to be a monumental challenge to cover my slice of bread. I want to make it clear that his is not one of those “Don’t cry for me Argentina” moments; I am not trying to play the martyr. I am just trying to avoid the pride swelling defensiveness that ambushes me when some of my general incompetence is on display as things fall apart.

Here is the painful truth. Sometimes things must fall apart if they are to change as completely as they must. My limitations are perhaps an ingredient to that important process. Falling limbs and mulching accidents are the catalysts to greater safety and focus in the long run. It’s just that I hate being the lumberjack who forgot to button his flannel. Playing the part of the object lesson is an important, albeit humbling, role.

War with the world.

Even within the most recent context of my life I carried it as a badge of honor the ongoing conflict between me and the world. I saw myself, in what must seem like romantic idiocy on par with Don Quixote, as a fighter behind enemy lines. I walked out my front door swinging. Each human interaction became an engagement of invisible powers. Certainly such a narrative exists Biblically, but this was woefully applied by yours truly. The driver next to me is not mine to overcome, nor the librarian part of the horde, and finally the approaching retail associate does not carry the flag of my enemy. Even the most belligerent soccer mom or early morning jogger does not hide the seeds of my undoing. And yet... they are not with me. Right? Irrelevant.

The gospel in a moment of honest drama depicts a moment of observation by Jesus who sees the masses as something I never do; harassed and helpless (Matthew 9:36). It would only be condescension on my part to say that I understand this. I do not have the ability to see things as truly as Jesus did. To me the arrogance of the wealthy is not a cry for help nor the transparent symptoms of harassment. To me, it is what it is, the ugliness of human depravity. Which is why I am not Jesus. I would have to fake superior wisdom and magnanimity to say I see such people as harassed and helpless.

It is in this I suppose I've had to arrive at a different conclusion. I am little different from what surrounds me essentially. I too am oppressed by a nature I twisted for too long a time. I am afflicted by self-made affliction no different that of the unsmiling toll booth operator or mocking grad student with whom I just babbled a messy invitation to Bible Talk. Are they with me? What does it matter? We together belong to a community of sinking ships. Some try and bail water while others live those waning moments in revelry and others are paralyzed by the despair of it all. Everyone needs rescuing. We are with each other in that crucial fact.

It is only at a certain philosophic level, removed from real time interaction, I can view the world around me as harassed and helpless the way Jesus did. For that very reason I have no authority to deem who is and who isn't an enemy for whom I must wage war. So I am suitably removed from that horse and I must ask for necessary humanity to smile more often, remember more names and faces, and finally to join the PTA or Homewood Book Club etc. I have no war to fight with them. I am rescued from this ship and they cannot strip me of it. I can only hope to bail enough water that others will realize and come along.

Fresh from the woods

I recently returned from an annual backpacking trip I take. The point of this trip, for me, is restorative in nature. The adventure and beauty of being in a more remote wilderness is the inhalation the creative but somewhat asphyxiated mind needs. Yet, even beyond the respite (if one can call a 50 mile trek carrying 50 lbs on your back a respite) this provides lies something more primal I am convinced. It is a tired sentiment, yet no less true, to suggest that a man might need the wild. Risking the ridicule I probably deserve I can only nod in agreement and admit that I need the mud and rock and air and solitude and water that I find only in the quantity required when I seek the wilderness. This year that search was made in Algonquin, a park three hours north of Toronto. While it is no Denali or Glacier or Patagonia it is one of the closest things I can find in under a 12 hour drive. I walked each day in wonder of and infatuation with the world around me; to touch truck-sized boulders carpeted with moss, fallen pines made smooth by a running creek and midnight silence broken by the loon.

I asked to hike the last four miles of our trip alone. Those 90 minutes afforded me the opportunity to turn my mind back-forward; a week outside time displaced my need to consider any planning outside of water, dinner and shelter. I needed to take some time to consider real life before I left. To consider the future, yet within the context of this wilderness. So I walked and I attempted to put myself back inside of time asking what I might think about differently after yet another week in the woods.

This year the answer was joy. The gratitude which produces unreserved affection and laughter; the yearning attachment to my living blessings and the almost oblivious awareness of rewards yet to come. There is no greener grass, so to speak. I wanted more than anything to have only what I've already been given and to enjoy them as long as they were still mine to have.

However, there was a footnote to these last moments of solitude. A post script so that I'd not forget my own prayers during my time in the woods. To that footnote I will commit more time in my next entry, but in essence it was a particular personal trait I was able to articulate for the first time. I am always at war with the world around me and this needs to change. A truce of a kind must be made.