Enough

When you realize that the part where you had to carry your bike up the steps was completely avoidable had you just gone around the corner is what it’s all about at least some of the time: mistakes are learning experiences, except that quite often enough, had you been paying the right amount of attention, you wouldn’t have had to make those mistakes in the first place.

It’s a strange day, right in the middle of something that could be; so, you’ve got to appreciate the effortless effort like the Buddhists, I think, remind us of.

It’s good to be persuaded; free will is an illusion, anyway.  We are programmed to believe we are not programmed.  And that’s part of the program, too, isn’t it?

David Chalmers says that the philosophical progression is from Materialism to Dualism to Panpsychism to Idealism; that makes sense: in the end it’s all 0’s and 1’s in the mind of God, anyway, but you’ve still got to love the internal experience of seeing that almost full moon over the top of the building that used to be something else, below the hill that once was another, right?

Finally, at the end of it all is the beginning of something else. There won’t be anyone left anymore to decipher what’s left.  It will be way more like biology than anthropology for our octopus descendents.

But if they’re lucky, they will have something analogous to the bicycle.  They’ll suction cup their eight legs to a device that has the same number of pedals as their octilateral symmetry and carry on over the crumbled remains of Seattle’s oldest bicycle path, just like in those moments somewhat before midnight on a perfectly dry fall evening in our fair city just days away from the full moon with lots of leaves turning their brightest red before falling to earth within the next few days; and then you’re home and glad of it because, after all, enough.

Dumb

In retrospect, it seems like a perfect metaphor for American foreign policy, or Napoleon’s catastrophic siege of Moscow, or maybe a co-dependent relationship with someone you just can’t quit: you know that the way forward is impassible, but you just keep going, becoming deeper and more deeply mired in the literal and metaphorical swamp; your mind—and a more reasonable colleague—tells you that you’ve got to turn back, but you neither take its advice nor their example, until finally, you just have to give up, as you should have almost right from the start, and return along the terrible way you came, only this time uphill.

Thank Heavens for taller and stronger comrades who lift you and machine up out of the mire and over the fallen barriers or else you would have found yourself trapped in the dark until someone else found you, who knows how long later, your rotting corpse eaten by maggots and worms, that last warm beer still in your bottle cage, dripping ever so slowly into the earth.

So, maybe it wasn’t quite all that dire, but it sure felt like it for much of the way back, until at last, asphalt re-appeared and there were only hills to contend with, no more slippery plank bridges or blackberry branches swatting and scratching your face.

Type 2 or Type 3 fun? Maybe some of both.  

In retrospect, the steeper-than-remembered mash up the back way to the Little League fields was swell; the Joseph Conrad-style descent into the heart of darkness, though, maybe you could have done without, although the starting trails that led one astray like that were impeccable.

But, anyway, it surely pays to do the dumb thing from time to time, if only to remind yourself how easily it is to be dumb and eventually, how dumb you can be.

And, perhaps, most importantly, how lucky you are for the chance to be dumb, and grateful you are, as well.