you know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
The seasons. The years. The cycles of time.What’s old is new again.
Kids growing up. Getting married. having kids of their own. Children, parents, grandparents.
Cyclical cycles of interminability.
I am sitting here, day-dreaming on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I am thinking of the discussion I just had with my college aged son. He tells me stories of life as if he is inventing the concept.
He talks to me in code as if I couldn’t understand. He briefly mentions dating and partying and spring break and college hijinx. He answers because I ask. But he is hiding the details. They say the devil is in the details. He coats the discussion with a frosting of antiseptic to keep me anesthetized to the reality of his new found freedom.
I laugh. It’s all so funny. As if I have always been his dad, the age I am now, preserved like a native american hyrolglific in stone.
Life is so seemingly extemperaneous, but ultimately so choreographed.
I remember sugar coating my “lunatic fringe” experiences while talking to my dad.
Little did I know that he lived his own lunacy, and tempered it from his father, and I’m sure his father before him.
Life is a race track, and no matter how hard you run, you always end up back where you started, somehow.
With this thougth filling my mind, I gaze into the backyard. I see trees that seem barren, almost dead. I don’t worry. I know they will soon be reborn filled with blooms and the renewed color of life.
I look at my lawn filled with crab grass and weeds. I know it looks like a cheap toupee on an old derelict now, but throw a lawn mower across it and viola. What’s old is new again. Neatly trimmed and green, it will show the renewed signs of life.
I watch birds building nests and rabbits prancing along the shrub line. Old rabbits? New rabbits? does it matter?
Another St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. Girls wearing tight green t shirts that say kiss me I’m irish have come and gone. There were fights and phone numbers exchanged and toasts made that mean nothing. If you found your pot of gold good for you. I’m still looking.
Next up another Good Friday, then Easter and the Earth keeps spinning, life keeps ticking.
I don’t know much, but I know this, what was old is new again.
I hear a U2 song on the radio. It brings me bck to a moment in 1985. It reminds me of the Pacific and dreams floating in a sky filled with possibilities. 30 years have come and gone in the time it takes that song to play. It seems like yestterday. It is a life time ago.
What was old is new again. My kids, your kids, our lives. one birthday after another. Anniversary’s. We sleep and wake and eat and go to work and what is the purpose?
The Earth spins around the sun and then 365 days later, here we are again. How many trips around the sun is anyone’s guess.
As I sit here watching birds build yet another nest and ants carry yet another twig into an Earth that is awakening, I wonder why.
What are we suppose to do with this time given us? It’s finite and uncertain. We are in cars with a gigantic gas tanks with a guage that is broken. How far have we gone? How much further can we go?
Life is a journey not a race. But most journey’s have a course heading, a direction, a purpose. Life does not come with this map.
As I sit here ruminating the meaning of life, I wonder if the lyrics to this song are not appropriate:
“clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”
The question is; what are we stuck in the middle of?
All I know is the sun rises. The sun sets. The sun rises.
Why?
I think Hemingway tried to find that answer at the bottom of an endless bottle of gin.
Are we suppose to be the best we can be? Should we excel morally ethically, spiritually, financially parentally? All of the above, I suppose.
I am not a buddhist monk who meditates for 18 hours a day so I can’t answer this one for you.
The clouds are floating by on a canvas of blue. The sounds of children laughing is floating over my fence. I hear a dog barking and somewhere a bar b que grill is firing up.
There’s a butterfly on my chair and a bumble bee hovering over the bush. I notice an unpaid power bill on the kitchen counter. A gust of wind grabs the screen door and flings it wide open. It bangs into the house stridently.
What does it all mean? What is the purpose?
Is the goal selflessness or selfishness? Where is the line? Is there a line?
Are we on a carosel that is painted and pretty and ultimately takes us nowhere?
There is a fence that surrounds my property. Is it fencing me in? Is it fencing my neighbors out?
Last night I saw middle school kids in the lobby of the theater. They were goofy and thought they were so cool. It’s forever and a day that I was that kid, without a thought about the future or a worry in the world. Maybe thats the way we are suppose to be? Unafraid, wide eyed, ready to absorb whatever the ride presents to us.
I don’t have the answer. If I did, I could have told you not to take Duke all the way to the Final Four.
I think that living for right now is the answer. Be a good person, be true to yourself and the ones you care about. Remember that life is about right now.
The ants carrying the twig into the hole in the ground have no expectation past that. Maybe they have the right idea.
Everyone pitch in, carry some of the load, and then enjoy.
If I’m wrong, this much I know, the sun will set, it will rise, and you will get a chance to try it all over again.
if that’s what’s meant to be.
and that is crazy.™