Curmudgeon Gospel

Curmudgeon and granddaughter.

Assaulted
by a culture he doesn’t fit
and doesn’t want,
if he ever did.
Growling outwardly,
raging inwardly;
in curled up, rampant id.

Control and authority,
for years his own,
took a bow, swept low,
and disappeared;
leaving him alone.
Pride wrung from badges
worn, now wearing thin.

Younger versions of himself
queue to undermine him,
devoid of self awareness;
all arrogance, contempt.
It’s fun goading dinosaurs 
overtaken, behind times,
broken, toothless and bent.

Beneath the bluster,
in his night wander,
wriggling on hooks
of cruel self pity,
comes prayer.
Disconnected scraps
of visions fade and flare.

Bold achievements
and battles now nothing,
bring revelations
of two-edged truth;
of family and friends
he’d loved, 
when time allowed.

He waits for sleep.
Boyhood memories seep
through time and years.
He’d thought to slay dragons,
but dragons had thrived.
They’d breached the gate;
were now inside.

What had happened to him?
What had he become?
All for nothing?
An army of one?

He sensed, rather than saw, God.

God spoke
a very different gospel.

The defender of truth,
the warrior, was tired.
Having heard his creator speak 
as if for the first time, 
he relaxed, breathed deep.
And freed, he fell asleep.

On holding a newborn Granddaughter

Skin softer than anything I remember.

Feet curling with my touch.

Out of her depth she responds tentatively, faintly, gazing unfocused, inwardly sorting through the inputs and wondering at each new surprise. Eyes resolutely closed, prefering an inner world of comfort and routine; barely apprehending where she is; still less what it all means. She accepts each new thing. She trusts. She’s not learned to hide emotions. She blurts them. Beautifully, primally, thrusting, trusting.

Were we ever like that? Whenever did we learn to blush, turn aside, cover and hide?

The baby flutters her response to my carry. Her chest trembles slightly, faintly, and then settles peacefully into a place, if I ever knew, I have long since forgotten how to find.

Feels hunger; moves to satisfy it. Wants comfort; asks for it. She lives by faith, as truly as I could only ever dream of.

I think how beautifully human she is, without the baggage; without all that is to come; all that must come. Was I ever as she is now? Can I remember?

Must we hold babies before we understand who we ourselves are? The scheme of things?

My photo. Department Store, Milan. 2019

I will likely be dead before she is fully grown. I will not know her life, but I see her now, as it all begins.

What a privilege!

What a miracle!

I turn to my creator and smile in gratitude.

Island

Know the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers song, ‘Islands in the Stream’?

Sail away with me

To another world

Sailing or flying away is not always the way to find another world. Sometimes such places are right under our noses; ‘hidden in plain sight’ (I know . . it’s a movie title).

There are special places, if you want to look for them, in the midst of the flow, but outside it. Islands, if you like; as yet not quite submerged in an ocean of nihilistic screechings in the contemporary world.

I was invited to enter one of these places last weekend, by my brother-in-law, who is a member there.

(Members Library. My photo)

The Warwick Club is one of a very few institutions of its type to survive the ravages of time, modernity, gender wars, and economic reality. It is a club formed more than a century ago by the gentlemen of Warwick, in the state of Queensland, Australia for the gentlemen of Warwick and their guests. Since then non members and ladies have been welcomed only by invitation.

There is a certain inevitability to change. Having successfully avoided acknowledging the twentieth century, the Warwick Club will not be immune to the twenty first, but more likely for economic reasons than any will of the membership.

Members’ sitting room

Signing the visitors’ book and being introduced around, I was conscious of entering a special place, vastly different from the surrounding flow. It was an island. It had been bypassed; an anachronism; yet I felt a strong connection with something difficult to define. It’s sort of clichéd to speak of a window into the past, so I won’t.

The members in the bar took their responsibilities to guests seriously. I was included in the conversation and treated with courtesy and respect. They were mostly my age and older. The club has difficulty attracting younger men. It wasn’t hard to imagine it would not survive those present.

One day in the medium future, this particular island will sink into the swirling waters of the modern world.

I don’t know why they struggle to keep the doors open, but I am glad they do.

Friday night attendance was down, I was told.

Quite apart from the heritage value of the place, those who have gone before are not forgotten here. Their spirit and their lives is in the fabric of the building and of the bonds between the men who continue to come here.

It remains an island; a sanctuary; somewhere to come for an hour or two and ponder on the things that matter. There is a strong sense of meaning in its walls. It seems to me that aside from providing a safe harbour for male friendship and mutual support, it stands defiantly against the currents of meaninglessness and hopelessness that undermine traditional value systems.

It’s all very well to snort at these types of places, anachronisms that they are. It is another to replace them with something better.

After all, there’s not many problems a game of snooker can’t improve.

This Guy is Good

Jordan Peterson, rock psychologist, iconoclast, mentor and inspiration to well, hundreds of thousands (at least).

I went to an ‘Evening with Jordan Peterson’ along with about 3000 or so others last night. I am so glad I did.

Do you know any other speaker who gets a consistent standing ovation both before and after his presentation? Well maybe you do, but I do not.

The audience had slightly more men than women, and was spread across most demographics, but was overwhelmingly young. It was a novelty to see so many women and men in their early twenties listening attentively to a speaker talk about things like purpose, aims, and life narratives.

Absolute respectful silence reigned while he wandered back and forth across the stage, often seemingly in a monologue but always with tightly structured arguments. I was reminded of a socrates in a coat and tie, leaving his listeners to answer his questions silently for themselves as he took them further and further down the rabbit hole.

He spoke for 90 minutes without notes, jumping from idea to idea, challenging orthodoxies by the dozen, and entrancing his audience. Using imagination, you could picture the light bulbs appearing intermittently above thousands of heads. No doubt several pins dropped, but no one heard them. There was an energy in the auditorium I have seldom witnessed with any speaker before; different from that of a rock concert obviously, but there was no doubt several thousand people were in earnest conversation with Peterson and with themselves.

What was the take away message?

Professor Peterson draws deeply from the mechanical/objective world of deterministic psychology, using brain function studies to offer understandings about what it means for humans to live their lives well. Naturally this leads to consideration of values and morality, and inevitably, religious understandings of who it is we are.

Over the last couple of centuries, a mechanistic, scientific worldview has battled an older supernatural, mystical worldview, and has had some significant wins. This is the battle popularised by (and in my view, misrepresented by) Richard Dawkins et. al.

Peterson stands in both camps, denying neither, but beginning with supposedly objective scientific research to make a case for humans to look further than science if they seek to establish meaning in their lives. Science is a powerful way of describing the world, (paraphrasing him from last night) but its just that nobody- no one – actually uses science exclusively to define or describe themselves. If you want to explore your humanity; your purpose; your identity; then mechanistic science cannot take you very far.

I can hear the gnashing teeth of Dawkins warriors as I write this. So delicious!

We are extraordinarily complex and complicated beings, says Professor Peterson. In allowing ourselves to be defined and limited by the objective truths of science, we have shortchanged ourselves, misunderstood ourselves, and lost our sovereignty as created beings. (I hope that isn’t too much of a stretch from what he said).

Science tells us (more or less accurately) how we are. Religious narratives tell us who we are. Ignoring our spiritual dimension denies our humanity and ultimately, our identity. If I got nothing else out of last night’s lecture, I got that.

The individual is the instrument that shapes the world. We build our lives according to the circumstances we find ourselves in and the choices we make (and we all make choices).

In the Q and A session that followed, Professor Peterson really opened up, receiving outbreaks of spontaneous applause, and tides of barely articulated communal ‘yesses’. He tipped several buckets on post modernism; referring to its aimlessness and intellectual dishonesty; Pulled the rug from under Identity politics; and was scathingly contemptuous of gender fluidity initiatives by western governments. He also dismantled without mercy the rationale for mandatory equality of outcome (e.g. 50% women in various occupations), while supporting the fight for equality of opportunity: Equal opportunity is a very different beast from mandating equal outcomes.

He even ventured onto what has become very treacherous ground for a male; the blanket blaming and shaming of men for domestic violence.

It’s not hard to understand why a lot of people do not like what he has to say. He threatens their certainties after all.

On the other hand, not everyone is pursing their lips and reaching for their PC manuals. I listened entranced, along with thousands of others last night.

He was a breath of fresh air.

What’s not to like?

Something Bigger

“Why would someone do that?”

The question was posed more than once as we stood there in the morning light, sourced somewhere between incredulity and admiration.

The Crazy Horse memorial is a short drive from the better known U.S. presidential heads carved out of Mt Rushmore in South Dakota. Much larger and more ambitious, the head of Crazy Horse is now freed from its granite mountain after 70 years of constant work. A monument to the culture and history of Native Americans, the project is privately funded, and unlikely to be completed in the lifetime of anyone viewing it today. Reportedly the children and grandchildren of the original sculptor continue to work there.

“Why would someone do that.”

A whole career spent blasting, quarrying and shaping a granite monolith, with no hope of living to see the finished product. The question seemed reasonable enough, and I began to wonder. Why would a person tie themselves to such an intergenerational project?

Does it make any more sense to spend a whole career selling real estate? Would years spent in a classroom, or behind a shop counter, in customer service, on building sites, in an office somewhere, driving a bus, running a small business, playing music or writing poetry be better spent?

Isn’t that what most of us end up doing? Expending our lives without awareness of where our contribution fits, or of our worth?

“How are you going to spend your life, daughter/son?”

“Spend it on a project larger than yourself? Something that has a deep meaning for your people and their history?”

“No, I’ll just bum around, and see what turns up”.

(Prairie Dog pondering his options)

How many of us live life as a spectator? How many live life as a consumer? How many as a victim? How many of us just scratch their heads and wonder what happened? How many of us see ourselves as part of a larger story? How many of us know that our lives have made a difference?

It occurs to me there’s nothing wrong with being a spectator, or a consumer, or selling real estate, or whatever, as long as we don’t become preoccupied, and permit our lives to slip away unnoticed. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get to the end of my life, scratching my head wondering what happened.

Maybe those workers on the Crazy Horse project are on to something after all. There are answers for each one of us in the great narrative. It’s just that some of us never get around to asking the questions.

Finally, an image that kind of, sort of, contributes to my line of thought. Its beauty is a bonus.

(Somewhere in Wyoming. Taken from a bus window)

Freedom and Trust

It is likely there was a time for all of us, when we approached life as a small child does.

Excitement, joy, freedom, trust. They’re still there for me, but I have moved on from when I was a two year old. I no longer do cartwheels on a beach for the sheer joy of it.

Looking at this photo of one of my grandsons I began to wonder at the changes that happen to us while we live. I’m not talking about physical ageing so much as how our inner self is morphed by experience. Some call it the gaining of wisdom. I’m not so sure.

Freedom; that’s an interesting concept. It’s not always what we think it is when we are just starting out. If we see it simply as the absence of restrictions we’ve got the wrong end of the stick. We’re operating as a child or adolescent would do. This ‘freedom’ is dependent on the indulgence and sacrifice of parents and other adults. When an adult understands freedom as the absence of restrictions, pain and tears are never far away.

We may recoil from this type of ‘freedom’, and organise our lives around routine, enclosing them with habit; constructing comfortable cages for ourselves. Might I suggest this is a mistake?

Depending on how we look at it, we’re as free as we choose to be. As long as we are prepared for the consequences, we can choose to do just about anything. So many of us, I think, construct our own cages; paint and wallpaper them; renovate and add to them over the years, all the while telling ourselves we have fewer choices than we actually do. I’m not necessarily talking about houses or apartments here. It could be our superannuation, our reputation, needless anxieties about security, or listening to people around us who communicate their expectations of us in all sorts of ways. Older people, for example, are expected to be stable, predictable and stay out of the way.

When we step outside of the expectations others place on us, there are always consequences, but often they are not as drastic as we might think. Take my experience of the prison of expectations. Gentlemen over sixty should do certain things and not others. They do not, apparently, begin guitar lessons. That is something children and young adults do. The music teaching industry is not designed for older people to enter as students. You find yourself gently patronised. What you don’t find, unless you are lucky, is a teacher who recognises your passion and understands your need to play the best you can. They may welcome you as a source of extra income, but secretly scratch their head wondering why you are bothering at your age.

Neither do older gentlemen volunteer as a receptionist at a hospice. The first two years were the worst, until staff members finally got used to seeing an old guy sitting at the reception desk.

Neither do they learn a second language or write a blog. Thankfully the consequences for doing these things are usually no more than that family and friends remain a little off balance and wonder what you will get up to next. By now, I think, most have given up expecting me to grow out of it.

There is much more freedom in life than we are prepared to risk. The cages of our own and others’ expectations are flimsier than we might think. Now that is wisdom. You can take it or leave it.

Which leaves us with trust.

A two year old trusts instinctively and in most cases, that trust is honoured. Sooner of later though, trust becomes an issue for us. Some of us learn to trust nobody and nothing. Others continue to trust people and things long after that trust is abused.

When our trust is betrayed, the inner damage is profound. It is one of life’s worst experiences, especially when we had invested ourselves deeply in somebody or something. How many of us have not felt the pain of betrayal? Along the way, how many of us have not betrayed someone else’s trust? Speaking for myself, the consequences in either case can last a life time.

We learn, through experience, that trust is built up over time and can be destroyed in a second.

So trusting too widely is foolish, but trusting too little is sad. To trust is to allow ourselves to be as vulnerable as a little child. A person who cannot allow themselves to be vulnerable cannot know trust.

There are great risks we all must take, I think. Without risk, life loses excitement, joy, freedom and trust. We don’t need to do cartwheels on a beach to experience these things, although if I were a two year old I would. I get my excitement, joy and freedom these days with stepping outside the cages of expectation and taking a few risks here and there.

Trust, on the other hand, can be a little trickier and riskier. Worth it though. It is the greatest gift, apart from love, you can give anyone.

When we allow ourselves to experience freedom and trust, excitement and joy are the bonus.

Transformative People

(Fresco on the wall of an Armenian Church taken by me in 2015. Bullet holes courtesy of occupying Soviet soldiers)

I don’t know how many people, like me, want to make a difference, to work for good, but find themselves thwarted again and again by stuff. More than a few I suspect.

In my case, the obstacles along the way seem to multiply the harder I try to overcome them. Sometimes its a bit like walking through quicksand. The temptation to give up and climb onto the easier path is a strong one. Fighting injustice, caring for the poor, loving my neighbour and all that sort of thing is all very well and good. It’s just that it’s hard to keep going when the odds seem stacked against you.

Yes, I am feeling a little discouraged, but these things ebb and flow. It’s not all those people out there who don’t share my beliefs who get to me. What discourages me and presses my buttons most are the attitudes of some of my fellow ‘Christians’. I have met some of the most inspiring people in Christian circles, but unfortunately, the opposite is also true.

Some congregations are more like social clubs than anything else. The most animated part of the church experience for them is the coffee and chat afterwards; enthusiasm and engagement rarely rising above the comatose while they sit through the worship. The big interest items in these congregations are social functions, usually fund raisers, and the congregational meetings, at which weighty matters like budgets are discussed. Sitting through experiences like these I amuse myself by imagining one of the early Christian apostles wandering in and being confused by what they see. Seat warmers, hymn singers, response mutterers, but no evidence of people being nourished and equipped to go out into the world and make a difference.

Congregations like this, and there are many of them, are dying, and they deserve to. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, what their purpose is. Making strategic plans that are never followed? Getting the balance of music right? Or being Christ’s followers sent into the world to bring hope, love and acceptance where there is little of any of these?

Anglican theologian, N. T. Wright, is more sanguine than I am when he writes: “No matter what your worldview, your beliefs, or your culture, you will find Jesus haunting, disturbing, and attractive”. Well, you wouldn’t come across such a Jesus at some of the congregations I know.

The great majority of people don’t find Jesus ‘haunting, disturbing and attractive’ because that is nothing like the Jesus they have been introduced to. By and large, if they think of Jesus at all, they envision a caricature easily dismissed for the nonsense it is. It is a great pity that many people have rejected a Jesus who never existed, and has no relationship to the Jesus of the Bible, when the real deal is indeed haunting, disturbing and attractive.

So what of the great mass of people today who wouldn’t walk into a church ever, if they could avoid it? I sometimes find it easy to agree with them.

Wright continues:

“THE WORD God is a heavy, clunky little syllable. It drops like a lead weight into otherwise cheerful conversations.

the popular image of God as a bully in the sky who makes odd demands and becomes dangerously petulant if people ignore him.”

Wright congratulates people who have rejected such a God:

“They are right. That God—the dull, distant, and dangerous one—does not exist.

Is that old bearded figure, waiting on a cloud to receive the recently dead, even remotely like the God of the Bible?” The answer of course, is no.”

Not surprisingly, very many people reject such a misconstrued God. He is filed away, with other childhood tales. Many peoples’ understanding of God is based on childish misconceptions which have never been replaced by grown-up ones. They have never been replaced by grown-up ones because church goers have become comfortable sitting in their Christian ghettos, while the world goes its own way. They have forgotten who they are. No risk taking, imprisonment or crucifixions for them. Ignoring their local community, they hold endless discussions about ‘mission’, always done by someone else, somewhere else.

There ends the rant. If you are still with me, it’s not all bad. There is hope.

Two more Wright quotes follow that contain a vision for what can and should be. I will read them again. Afterwards I will remember who I am, and what I need to be working towards. No time then for discouragement or disillusionment.

“We know what the power of the world looks like. When push comes to shove, as it often does, it is the power of violence, using the threat of pain and death. It is, yes, the power of tanks and bombs, and also of guns and knives and whips and prisons and barbed wire and bulldozers. Weapons to destroy people’s lives; machines to destroy their homes. Cruelty in the home or at work. Malice and manipulation where there should be gentleness, kindness, and wisdom. Jesus’s power is of a totally different sort, as he explained to the Roman governor a few minutes before the governor sent him to his death—thereby proving the point. The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.”

“the power behind the cosmos is not blind chance, nor yet brute force, but love. It is a delighted love that celebrates the goodness and specialness of every part of creation and of the extraordinary, brilliant, pulsating entirety of it. A love that cares for and cares about the smallest creature and the farthest star. A love that made one creature in particular, humans, to share uniquely in the capacity to receive and to give love, and so to share uniquely in the vocation to work with the grain of the Creator’s intention, to bring his work to its wonderful intended fulfillment. There are many things in the world as it now is that conspire to make us forget this great truth. The good news of Jesus is there not only to remind us of it but to transform us with it so that we in turn may become transformative people.”

A Nod to Christmas Fairies

Posts have been a bit sparce on this blog lately. Is it that I've had nothing to say? Have I struggled for inspiration?

 

Yes, and yes. Simple answers for simple questions. We could leave it at that if you like. I will wish you a Merry Christmas and a safe journey, wherever you are bound.

 

 

Or, you could stay with me a while, as I prod and rattle a cage or two (gently of course).

 

 

(Europa Rosarium, Sangerhausen, Germany)

 

 

 

You're still here then? I'm glad you stayed.

 

Let's begin with the fairies that live at the bottom of gardens. My garden has a few, but they're shy and good at hiding. I sometimes think I notice a trace as a leaf, deftly pulled aside by tiny fingers, springs back into place, or a rustle in a garden bed makes me look up from my book. Our dealings are fleeting you see, nothing more than an inward smile and a whimsical nod to mark them.

I sense you shifting uneasily and wondering where this is going. Relax. You are in safe hands.

 

Some people of course would deny that any such fairy beings exist. Where is their imagination I ask? Where is their trust and innocence? What are the stories that light up their lives and transcend the everyday? Well I suppose they might have trust; in things different from those I trust in.

 

Can't pretend to be an authority on what others might trust in but I can account, with some authority, for myself.

 

 

Christmas, for example. There is a spirit in Christmas that speaks to me even though I can't see it or touch it. However much I try to dissect it, analyse it, or explain it away as a creation of consumer culture, it defies me. It is as real as anything in life. I feel it. That's enough for me.

 

Christmas delights me in spite of myself. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Coloured lights, Christmas trees, and carols play a part, but they are not Christmas in themselves. Giftwrapped presents? No, while they're nice, they're not Christmas. Family gatherings? As much as I love everyone in my family, such get togethers can be trials as much as delights. Any of these things can be missing and Christmas would still weave its magic.

 

Christmas gives me a renewed passion for life and for others. It reminds me that I am part of something larger than myself. It causes me to think about my life and how I'm spending it. It inspires me to do better than I have in the past. Memories of Christmases past stretch back through the years and passages of my life to childhood; to where it began for me. At this time of year I remember my grandparents, long gone, and how they loved me. I hear long forgotten Christmas carols, unwrap long discarded presents again, smell those delicious cooking smells again, taste figs, dates and stone fruit of all types in my mind. Such are the memories that return every year.

 

Christmas anchors me. It reminds me of who I am and from where I come. It cuts through the layers of my selfishness, even for only a week or two. Just as with fairies at the bottom of the garden, I am richer for its presence in my life, whether or not I can understand it, quantify it, commodify it, or tell myself I'm too old to be taken in. It is as real as I am. What more do I need to know?

 

 

I am noticing this Christmas time that our culture has changed significantly. Some of that leaves me sad. So be it. Change is inevitable and we can either accept and work with it, or not accept and be sidelined by it. I know that increasing numbers of people in my culture do not share my Christian faith, or have any spiritual dimension to their lives for that matter. I am comfortable with that. I think Christendom has done a lot of damage along with the good. Churches have allowed themselves for the past 1700 years or so to enjoy the trappings of power and the riches that come with it. That was a mistake, for which Christians in today's world will pay an increasingly heavy price as people turn towards churches with hostility. The Christian gospel was never about power and influence. It was always about setting people free. A pity churches largely forgot that for so long.

 

 

 

For some people, life is no doubt nasty, brutal and short. I have been luckier, although no doubt like you I've had a few ups and downs. Part of my good fortune has been to know that there is more to life than toys and prizes; more than self interest; more than is apparent to eyes and ears. I have learned that it is just as much folly to sneer at another person's faith as it is to deny the possibility that there might be fairies at the bottom of every garden, never to be discovered by those who will not see.

 

 

Whether you share my faith, or a different one, or believe you have none at all, I wish you a Merry Christmas and hope that you might catch a glimpse of the fairies who are surely there at the bottom of your own garden.

 

 

 

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A Life of Dreams

(Image of the Carina Nebula – Wikicommons)

 

 

I'm the first to admit it. I'm a nerd. A dreamy nerd, but a nerd.

Have been, on and off, right through my life. Now in my sixties I'm more adept at reading social cues than I used to be, and have learned to temper the hard angles of my nerdishness, but looking back at the nerdish boy-man of yesteryear I see a pattern.

 

As a boy I liked to read much more than to play sport. Still do, but that's more of a physical imperative now, with aches and pains and such. I lived in my mind then, designing intricate palaces, imagining great adventures in this world and out of it. I would spend hours inventing board games and playing them by myself. When encyclopedias were books, I revered them, leafing through and vacuuming up information about everything and nothing.

 

As I said, I was a little different . . . to say the least. A nerd.

 

Gadgets fascinated me; not so much fixing them, but using and understanding them. I was pretty much clueless when it came to repairs. The only workshop I felt comfortable in, was the one inside my mind.

 

And then I discovered astronomy. With a school friend who shared my passion, we would spend nights in the back yard gazing through small telescopes, entranced by what we saw and developing an encyclopedic knowledge of the night sky.

 

Yeah, I know . . . risk takers we were . . . adventurers. When other young teen males were dreaming of their sporting heroes, pop music, cars they would like to own, or girls, our dreams were extraterrestrial.

 

Astronomy was the first of a series of interests to grab me and inspire me to dream. As it turned out my mathematics scores did not let me realise my dreams of becoming an astronomer, and in hindsight that was no bad thing. You see, although I didn't know it, I was barking up the wrong tree as they say. Along with the wonder and physical beauty of the universe, which I love to this day, I had absorbed a trusting belief that the answer to my dreams was out there somewhere waiting for me to discover it. Sort of like Douglas Adams' boffins in his book “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” when they asked the great god-like super computer for the answer to 'life, the universe and everything'. The answer they got was 42.

 

Just as I did eventually, those boffins walked away glumly, disillusioned, except it took me a good few years, a physics degree, wrong turns and blind alleys to realise I'd been sold a pup. Ever slow to see the really important things in life, it was only in the fullness of years that I began to appreciate that although there might be exciting dreams aplenty in science and technology, my dreams were now to be found in an entirely different direction.

 

Mind you, I admit I remain prone to bouts of nerdish indulgence. I'm more excited about the latest toy drone I'm flying in the lounge room than is my grandson who has just received it as a birthday present. I'm interested in reference material of all types: Data tables of vehicle performance; Google Maps; Google Earth; optical devices; wiring diagrams of all types. These are but a few of my remaining guilty pleasures. Furthermore I read books on byzantine history, political analysis, German and Italian language learning, and I am learning to play classical guitar. There, I've said it! What a weight off my conscience. Us nerds carry a lot of guilt about being different.

 

But, where was I? Yes, my dreams. Nerds have them no less than most people, you know.

 

I used to dream about gadgets. It seems to me that gadgets are gadgets, and as fascinating and addictive as they may be, they remain gadgets. Computers, wireless devices, CAT scanners, GPS modules, hadron colliders, telescopes. Some of them produce data and information. Some of that is meaningful to me. None of it is the stuff of my dreams now.

 

Which begs the question: What does a nerdish old man dream?

 

My old school friend reminded me this morning via email of our shared interest in astronomy as boys and it inspired me to write this blog entry. Not surprisingly, my dreams have evolved along with me in the decades since those evenings in the back yard with a telescope. Dreams of what I would do with my life are no longer relevant. Such dreams have been rendered obsolete by the passage of time. I know what I am doing with my life now, and I am content.

 

Possibilities of meeting alien life forms or communicating with them via sophisticated gadgetry no longer seem quite so likely. The answer may be out there somewhere, but I didn't ever find it, and my questions, and dreams, are different now.

 

Now I dream of being accepted and valued for who I am: an old guy with nerdy tendencies, some of which he has learned to temper.

I dream of letting go of self importance and of embracing humility.

I dream of letting go of the need to know and to be in control.

I dream my wife, children and grandchildren will know I love them unreservedly.

I dream of being a good and true friend.

I dream of bringing smiles to people who need them.

I dream of being as one with my creator.

 

(Image of the Crab Nebula – Wikicommons)

 

 

 

So, the dreams change, bringing with them different questions that have different answers.

 

 

I guess life is about people, not gadgets. If you knew that all along, why didn't you sit me down and explain it to me when I was young?

 

(Image – Wikicommons)

 

 

In a life of dreams, I have indeed been a slow learner.

 

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Frequently Asked Questions (and uncommon answers)

 

I'm feeling a bit playful this afternoon, so I'm hoping you'll indulge me. Who says I don't have a sense of fun and the ridiculous?

 

How are You?

This would have to be a frequently asked question, don't you think? Despite the false humility we hide behind, we do like the opportunity to talk about ourselves. Only if the time is right and we suspect you might be interested, mind you. Otherwise you'll get one of our standard replies that mean nothing but sound as if they do.

Ok. Let's assume you might be interested in finding out how we are. What are you really asking? Do you want to know how we are feeling, our mood, about our health. Yes? Now that would be what we expect and, most times, we'd be happy to give you the good oil. On the other hand, you would be one very unusual person, and you would have some of us a little concerned about you, if you were instead asking “how” we are what we are, or how did we become what we are. That is, asking how we came to be male, female, wise, foolish, thoughtful, kind, cruel or whatever. How we came to be born at all; to be sentient; to have a brain; a sense of self and so on.

Very deep and complex questions, and I, for one, would not have a sensible answer for any of them.

It doesn't hurt to ask though, does it? There have to be answers somewhere. Want to share?

 

 

Who are you?

What if you didn't mean our name, or our job, or our role, or what position we held in the community? Who are we, apart from where we fit in to a family, a job, a community? That may see us a little unsettled, casting about for the words to describe ourselves cut free from the usual labels.

Are you a wife, a husband, a parent, a grandparent, someone's child, a sibling, a cousin? Do you have a title? A role?

Is that the sum total of you?

I am a husband, a father, a son, a brother. I like to write. I love my family. I love to read, to think about stuff, and to travel. I am empathetic, occasionally cranky and impatient, naturally slothful and a bit of a dreamer.

Is that essentially who I am? Is there more to me than that?

What thread of “you” connects all that you are, and have been, and will be? If you were to ask me I wouldn't have a sensible answer for this question either. Do you?

 

 

Where are you?

What? Relative to the chair we're sitting on? In front of, behind, or beside people near us? The room we're in? Our house, street, city, state, country? Are we wondering if we need sat/nav?

Might you be interested in which hemisphere we're currently in, which planet we're on, near which star, or where in the cosmos we are? How about where we are in the space-time continuum? Phew!

Might you instead just be exasperated that we're late? Might you be surprised that we've ducked out of sight unexpectedly?

Or might you perhaps be interested in where we see ourselves in relation to our life journey; the achievement of our goals and dreams?

Another simple and frequently asked question that carries within it the seeds of madness for those so inclined.

 

If trying to answer those three made you scratch your head, you might like to avoid these:

 

What are you?

 

When are you?

 

Which are you?

 

Why are you?

 

Are you?

(This last one would really be messing with your mind so feel free to ignore it).

 

 

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