more normal than not

 

So if I could get away with it, I’d probably scale things back until I owned nothing and lived in a van down by the river.

There wouldn’t be a whole lot to be responsible for in that case.

I’d own nothing except for my van and a whole lot of cloth diapers.

I’d probably need to get a gym membership so that we could all work out and clean up.

I’d have to have some gas to get to the gym…unless I didn’t complete the cliché and could live in back of the YMCA instead of down by the river.

I’d pull up in the mail jeep after a day of work, pull right in next to the van, and yell, “Honey…I’m home!!” and Jenny and the kids would peel themselves out of the van and greet me and then we’d get in the van and sit and wonder what it would feel like to have to worry about a possession like a REAL HOUSE.

Jenny would hate that.

Of course, the cliché is a sad and solitary man down by the river, compromised and given up, alone in his Econoline.

When you try and fit a family of 6 in a van, it would be too crowded for a long term living experience.

That would be kind of crazy.

I guess that when you get down to it, I need my stuff.

I need a bigger box to live in than a van provides.

I can’t see us all living in a van down by the river.

Mostly, I’m wondering if the absence of stuff is the same as the absence of worries?

If “nothing to have” is the same as “nothing to worry about”?

The “nothing ventured” in the title is all about considering an even bigger box to live in…or at least a smaller box on a bigger piece of land.

I’m moving farther away from “nothing” to worry about.

But if you don’t try, you’ve already failed.

I don’t know if complacency is the same as being comfortable.

Awwwww…what the heck. Go for it…what’s the worst that could happen?

There’s the million dollar question…”what’s the worst…”

I guess the answer to that would be the last part of that old phrase…the one I didn’t finish in the title of the post….

maybe the “worst” really is “nothing gained”?

Nothing gained except for a couple of new wrinkles and a way to worry about what already is…never mind the worries over “what could be”.

( Quick aside…for a break from unfocused rambling…check out this blog, Our Open Road…but do it after you try and finish reading my blog. I’d hate to think you missed any of ME. Now that’s a family doing it up right…living in a van by multiple rivers….and mountains…and oceans, etc. Check it out in a while…it’s pretty interesting.)

I’m going to jump this time…right into the river…going to see what rocks I bounce off of before I come out at the ocean…sandy beach and new sunrise and a place for the kids to run…maybe a different tree for a new swing, too…maybe even that?

I drink my juice, I make my coffee, I eat my oatmeal, I pack my lunch, I go to work and then come home.

I don’t stray from the habits I build. I don’t venture.

I DON’T TAKE CHANCES…I JUST THINK ABOUT THEM!!!!

What the heck…I don’t take chances…

But check out that old barn…and the…what about the?….and….

What do they say? “Nothing ventured…”?

I’m so freaking froggy.

 

 

I used to climb the ladder on the high dive when we visited the pool…and after I’d gotten to the top and looked at the drop in front of me, I’d occasionally turn around and climb back down.

That’s quite a confession…to reveal that I might be afraid of something.

You have to give me credit for such a brave confession. It takes a lot of courage to reveal something so embarrassing.

Nah…not really. It was embarrassing to climb back down in front of all those people…it’s not so embarrassing to talk about something like that now.

I don’t know why or how I developed a fear of heights…but the fear sticks around. I’m still pretty nervous about being exposed at the edge of the drop.

I’ve been proud of how safe I could keep things….how seldom we had to rock the boat in our recent history.

But you know, it’s easier not to rock the boat when you don’t put it in the water.

It’s not hard to keep your ducks in a row if you limit yourself to one duck.

So maybe it’s time to take a chance?

I’ve been feeling like maybe it’s time to start living for myself.

Sure, we just had a baby. Sure we have a child in college and another to join her in a couple of years. Sure, we should be careful.

Maybe now isn’t the time to do any rocking….unless it’s some “steady rockin” to an old Bob Marley song.

But maybe….maybe….maybe now’s the time for my little red sports car?

It’s on, baby…it ME TIME!!

I’m kidding…hilarious, huh?

Actually, I’m working on something that could be pretty interesting for the family…and it’s kind of a leap.

So we’ll see how everything comes together.

We’ll see if I climb back down the ladder or go right to the edge, take a closer look, and then make the jump.

It’s funny how vividly the climb down the high dive ladder stays in my memory…but the short trip down to the water when I didn’t back down, wind against skin before I hit the surface, doesn’t seem to be as memorable.

That’s the victory…the times I actually followed through and made the jump…but the things I seem to fixate on are the occasional failures.

Weird how that works.

I’ve heard people use the phrase “go big” before…like if you’re going to do something, do it up right…do it like the possibility of failure doesn’t exist, like you know that the first rung of the ladder is just the beginning of the journey back down to the water…not some kind of weird challenge that will probably end in a reverse climb down the ladder and embarrassment in front of some of your peers.

Whether you end up swimming because you jumped in…or because you fell in…either way, you’re going to get wet.

You may as well jump in and expect the best.

That’s my personal public pep talk for the morning.

I’m a third of the way up the ladder….and, I swear, this time I’m going to jump.

 

When you wake up really early…when you’re already getting up early…the rooster doesn’t know when to crow.

I beat him to the punch this morning.

I couldn’t sleep.

It’s freaking early…quiet…peaceful.

I went downstairs to make some coffee and found myself waiting by the stove for the teakettle to boil so that I could pour some hot water over the grounds in the french press and …

just watching the teakettle…waiting…

and I thought, “hey…how much of my life have I spent waiting for something to happen so that I could do the thing that I thought I wanted to do?”

Just watching…waiting….

it’s so early…and I’m standing by the stove…waiting for a whistle to tell me it’s time to move on to the next phase of my morning.

Now, my coffee is ready and I’m drinking it…but still waiting…

Somehow, it’s always easier to see movement after the fact…easier to see where I’ve been when I can look behind me and see the light path I’ve worn.

I guess that we’re really like any collection of molecules anywhere in the world….always moving, even when we’re standing still…vibrating even when we aren’t going anywhere.

I’m in the kitchen in our home on this planet Earth…waiting for the whistle of the boiling teakettle…and I’m spinning through space, held to ground by something I will never understand but that I have to accept as being real.

It holds me…and I wait for my simple morning ritual to complete…really aware of nothing except the “distraction of me”.

Maybe the whole Garden of Eden/Tree of Knowledge story isn’t about God warning not to eat that fruit because it might pose a challenge or display unforgivable disobedience…maybe it was a kindness…like, “Oh….nahhhhh…you don’t want to go there! That’s nothing that you need to know about…just let it be…get on with your lives. You’ve got a good thing going…you don’t need to know about some of that stuff.”

Of course, like the criminal at the end of Clint Eastwood’s 44 magnum, we “gots to know”…so, bingo, we eat the fruit and our eyes were opened and BAM…

Dangit.

DANGIT!!!

Why do I have to know about all of this stuff?!

Why do I have to know about any of this stuff?

It just clouds the issue…makes my head hurt. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle when everything starts to hit the fan.

You can’t get away with just composting the “bad fruit” when you’ve already had a big honking bite.

I’m not riding a brakeless car downhill towards the lake of mental illness…I don’t ponder vibration and the “Garden” and other such unnecessary imponderables very frequently.

I’M REALLY ONLY PLAYING…LIMPING TOWARDS MY 500 WORDS…

Maybe what I’m thinking is that the only things that really matter in this world are the things that we act on.  All our words and “watching the teakettle” evaporate like so much steam…they disappear and are gone when we are gone.

All our plans mean doodley squat in the end…it’s only the things that we do that matter.

Watching the kettle is different than drinking the coffee.

I guess that you do have to watch the kettle some before you can make the coffee, though…

Awwwwww…forget it.

My father wasn’t a man who talked about “things he wished he’d done” very often.

I’m sure that he had dreams and a vision for his future that might have been different from the life he ended up living.

That doesn’t mean that he lived his life in a constant state of disappointment. As far as I could tell, he was reasonably happy. That was one of the kind things he did for us…if he was unhappy or dissatisfied with anything, he didn’t really let on that that was the case.

But I think that all of us have things that we thought our lives might hold for us. We all have some dream that we tuck away somewhere that we keep secret from the world.

What’s the point of sharing some of this stuff, anyway? Nobody wants to be distracted from their own lives by someone else talking about their dreams and aspirations…nobody wants to hear about the things that didn’t work out.

My father did tell me once, though, that he thought at one time that he would have liked to go to Australia and become a veterinarian.

This was before the Man from Snowy River and Crocodile Dundee…so I don’t think any of his aspirations were fueled by a weird desire to wear a duster and a fancy hat and “put another shrimp on the barbie”

My father’s dream of Australia came a long time before any of the things that drove interest in that country.

It came somewhere between all the people being sent over from the prisons…and Paul Hogan happening.

That’s a pretty big swatch of Australian history…so somewhere in there, my father thought that he should go “down under” and take care of the cattle.

I was thinking about that dream that he’d mentioned once to me, and I realized that if he’d gone down to Australia, it wouldn’t have been a matter of me speaking with a different and more pronounced accent now…it might have been a situation where I never existed in the first place.

I probably would never have “come to be” at all.

Talk about the luck of the draw…if my father had lived out a life that he’d considered, I might never have walked the earth.

That’s what I say was kind of a close call.

Like most of the things that I think about, that’s no great revelation to realize that this life is a matter of the smallest decisions.

“Go to Australia…don’t go to Australia”…or even “Nah…I don’t think that I’ll go to that Diamond Brand Christmas party….I’m kind of tired..” (in my case…but that’s a different story)…it’s all a matter of little twists and turns and the things that we act on that set our lives up for what they…and we…become.

Parents are fully formed in a child’s mind…sometimes, they seem to exist only to serve the needs of the child. They’ve done their living…had their chance…and now it’s time to step aside a little and let “Junior” come over.

Of course, that’s not true. A parent has a deep well of “wish it had” and “what would have happened if…” thoughts tucked away in their secret “hope chests”…like all of us. A parent is often a pretty multi-faceted being…there’s more to a parent than meets a child’s eye.

My father might have been on his way to Australia sometime in the past…veterinary degree in hand…to live a different life with a different set of people. That might have been his choice for his life…that might have been the way he rolled…all the way “down under”.

That was interesting to hear him share that with me.

It is pouring.

It’s Monday.

It’s pouring down rain on a Monday and I work for the United States Post Office, whose accepted motto is something about “rain..or sleet…or shine…”.

Good grief.

It’s not something to complain about, really, but I do anyway. I dislike driving the mail around in the rain….no matter how good my thrift store Gore-tex is.

There’s something about having to keep everyone’s mail dry that puts a real damper on my day.

And here’s Elvis with the spin on the situation…”I believe for every drop of rain that falls…a flower grows..”

Dang you, Elvis. I knew that….it doesn’t stop me from getting really wet that some flower somewhere is celebrating Spring and is growing like a weed.

Your little song doesn’t help me get over hating the sound of the deluge on my metal roof.

The “rub” of it all is that we had some monumentally great weather while I was off for a rare 3 days.

It was great…perfect, beautiful. It was nice enough that we couldn’t take it for granted. It was a blessing that demanded observation…it was freaking great.

I loved that it was really nice for my birthday.

I couldn’t get over how nice it was.

And here I am, whining about the weather as if the beautiful days never happened.

This rain isn’t even a setback. (I almost said something like, “…it’s only a temporary setback” but that wasn’t true…so I didn’t.)

It’s just part of the ebb and flow of walking around on this big green and blue ball that I live on.

Sometimes it rains…sometimes it shines.

And…apparently…I’m supposed to drive around with a whole bunch of sponges made out of paper no matter what the weather is doing.

Truth be told, though…this song captures my mood a little bit better than the Elvis one.