Can You See From Where You Are?

I HOPE YOU SAW the segment on 60 Minutes last Sunday night, reported by Wynton Marsalis. The segment was called The Virtuoso: Marcus Roberts. Here's a link to the video in case you missed it.

Marcus Roberts (CBS News)

The story begins:

Marcus Roberts lost his sight as a child, but gained incredible insight into American music -- inspiring a generation of jazz musicians. Marcus went blind when he was 5 years old. And soon began trying to make sense of life in the darkness. He was unusually curious, and even tore his toys apart just to find out how they worked. Roberts developed a powerful, analytical intelligence, capable of producing music that will move your mind as well as your body. The story of his genius begins with a precious gift from his parents: a piano. His mother Coretta is sightless too, blinded by glaucoma. She remembers the pain of having to leave school in the seventh grade because she couldn't see the blackboard.

Don't you marvel? Think of these people who are sightless, but have such keen insight. One of those people, Helen Keller, reminds us that there is something worse than being sightless:

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision. -- Helen Keller

I couldn't resist adding this photo of our grand-girl Harper. I don't know what she is imagining seeing through her "binoculars" (upside-down, no less), but clearly, whatever it is, is magnificent.

As we age, we seem to lose our vision. I'm not talking about our eyesight, although that happens too. But let's face it; we do NOT see the things a young child or a blind jazz musician does.

My dad will be 90 soon. He has lost most of his eyesight, but it seems to me like he "sees" more than he ever has, and he has always been an insightful man. So maybe there's hope for me. Maybe I won't become visionless. I want to look through the binoculars, or the camera, or the lament of the Blues, or a quiet Saturday morning enjoying a good, strong cup of coffee and the company of my Amazing-Missus, and SEE something I've never seen before.

And ultimately, there is that promise. Remember the verse? “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” 

Several years ago now, death came way too soon for my cousin, "Bobby." He always had a toughness and swagger than I admired as a little kid looking up to him. He seemed to see things I couldn't. At his memorial service, he wanted a certain song played. I've never heard it played at a funeral since. Maybe it was just apropos for Bobby. It goes like this:

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone, 
I can see all obstacles in my way 
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind 
It’s gonna be a bright, bright 
Sun-Shiny day. 

I think I can make it now, the pain is gone 
All of the bad feelings have disappeared 
Here is the rainbow I’ve been praying for 
It’s gonna be a bright, bright 
Sun-Shiny day. 

Feeling Pretty Self-Actualized If I Do Say So Myself

I'LL ADMIT IT. One of the scariest aspects of being a "man of a certain age" is the fear that I've reached THE END. Not the physical end, but that place old guys seem to come to where they stop growing; again, not in a physical sense, but as a person. You know what I mean: they think they've seen it all, heard it all and know it all. They "arrived"!

Maybe what's so scary about that for me is thinking that if I have arrived, then this is all I have to offer--that I've become all I can become except a cranky, old, dogmatic, Fox-News watching, horses's a-double-s.

When I was first introduced to the idea of "self-actualization" (especially Abraham Maslow's take on it) back in college, it rang very true for me. Without going in to the whole concept, let's overly narrow it down to this: Think of a continuous line, like a ruler. On one end is our Potential. On the other is our Actual. So, if I become a healthy self-actualized adult, it means, very simply, that I've moved along the scale from potential to actual. By the way, Maslow speculated that less than 1% of the population ever becomes fully self-actualized.

I hope, I HOPE, that during this era that I like to call my "second-coming of age", I will realize brand new, deeper and more significant potentials I can pursue.

But wait. Let me get my horse and cart in the right order. There are a couple of issues I need to clarify.

One: for those of you who are saying to yourself (as if anyone is still reading this), "I knew this guy was a 'secular humanist' all along. Just listen to this drivel," you're not the first.

Back in the day, I had a job as a teacher/consultant of sorts for people who worked with adolescents in churches. I would frequently use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to talk about what can happen as a teen develops. One time I was leading a conference for youth leaders in southeastern Oklahoma. A man came in to the conference wearing a snappy pair of white patent leather loafers and matching belt (think: Cousin Eddie) and introduced himself as "Pastor Roy Somethingorother." When I asked Pastor Roy why he had chosen to come to a conference for youth leaders he told me that he was only there to monitor what I had to say, to make sure I was not a "humanist."

All during the meeting I noticed him making notes in a miniature stenographers notebook like a reporter at a Whitehouse briefing. I expected at any moment for him to jump to his feet and shout, "Bingo, we've got ourselves a heretic!" He never did, and I never heard anything from Roy or whomever he was representing. Maybe he was just taking notes for his next sermon.

I do believe that we are created in the image of a creative God to be fully human. If that makes me a humanist, so be it.

Next: there is the big question of knowing what our potential is. Remember that line, our continuum, with POTENTIAL on one end and ACTUAL on the other? Before we can actually reach our POTENTIAL we need to know what it is. But where do we find that out?

Back when I was a kid, our report cards from school had a place for the teacher to record, in her opinion, whether or not we were "performing up to our potential." There was a consensus among my teachers that I was "NOT." There may have been one exception to that, my fourth grade teacher, even though she did check the "needs to improve" box.

Recently around our house, we've been going through some old stuff: treasures, photos, heirlooms, etc. In one of the boxes I ran across old report cards my mother had saved; although I'm not sure why unless she wanted to show them to parents of troubled kids to demonstrate there's always something to hope for.

Attached to my final fourth grade report card was a note from my teacher to my parents.

[If you can't read the letter in this image, I've included the text of it below.]

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I'm glad that I didn't see this letter until 50-plus years later. It could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts had I seen it at the time. Instead, I like to imagine it as some sort of destiny.

I take heart that I helped make my teacher's career more pleasant. I like that she picked up on and commended my "gay outlook to everything," (I'm taking that to mean the 1960 definition of the word. Not that there's anything wrong with a more 2000s definition.) I am also relieved to note that my teacher apparently only owned a red ink pen and it wasn't just that all of my papers were graded in red. I liked the way she pretended to struggle with the proper use of  the are/is  verb form and its agreement with "Boys" or "David" just to make the rest of us feel good.

But I am most proud that Mrs. Burchette noticed, early on, a POTENTIAL for a sense of humor and that even THAT could take me "far in life." And, although I'm sure my parents had rather read something like, "He has the intellect of a rocket scientist", I feel SO self-actualized.

So, when my Grand-Girls say, "You're funny Pops," I think to myself, "Yes! Yes I am!" Thank you Mrs. Burchette, wherever you are.

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Text of the letter:

The Fullers,

It was a pleasure having David in my room this year. Boys like David are what make a teacher's career pleasant. He always seems to have a gay outlook to everything.

It was also nice meeting and talking with you. I want to thank you for all the help you gave me in working with David.

He is a boy to be proud of and with his sense of humor he will go far in life.

Mrs. Burchette

Path or Trail?

IN THE LAST POST, A Baron, Fried Chicken & Trailblazing, I quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

A little background refresher: remember Emerson was a good friend and mentor to Henry David Thoreau. It was on Emerson's land near Walden Pond where Thoreau lived his two year, two month and two day experiment in roughing it for self-reliance sake. As a result, we have Thoreau's book Walden--one of my favorites. Here's an abridged line from the book:

"I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived".

Maybe this adventure was inspired partly because of his mentor's talk of paths and trails. Maybe it was partly because of his own observation that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation."

In that last post I mentioned a few things I hoped people might say about me, if they say anything at all... someday... One of the things I don't want them to say is "he lead a life of quiet desperation." Let me clear something up: my objective in life is not to live in such a way that people will have good things to say at my funeral. Hopefully that will just be the honest summary of the reflection, sprinkled with a dash of our tendency to remember the newly departed a little better than they were. (Okay so you can add, "and he was cynical.")

While we're clearing things up, please don't assume that I count my life to this point as hollow and desperate just because I'm intrigued about trailblazing. At this point, I take a look back and say, (with all humility of course) "So far; so good." In fact as I look back and count my blessings I can even say, in the words of my friend Grady Nutt, "So good; so far."

Back to this whole Trail (slash) Path thing. I researched (googled) the difference between the two and found this:

Definition

"A path is a trail in which all vertices (except perhaps the first and last ones) are distinct. It seems at first glance that a path could also be defined as a walk in which all vertices (except perhaps the first and last ones) are distinct.
By this definition it would appear that a path is automatically a trail, because if an edge were to be retraced in any walk, then the vertices at either end of it would necessarily be visited more than once. However, under this looser definition, the walk u→v→u for two adjacent vertices u and v, for example, would fit the definition of a path, and therefore be a cycle. But such a walk is not a trail, as the edge uv would be traversed twice. Hence the insistence that a path is a type of trail." http://www.proofwiki.org/wiki/Definition:Path_(Graph_Theory)

What the What?

I guess we're on our own to decide the difference and get at what Emerson was saying.

In the last post, I mentioned that I had an issue or two with Ralph's rhetoric. Here's my main objection. He seems to be implying that there is only one trail and one path. I hope he's wrong. I think I can prove he is.

We'll take up there in the next post I'll call: "WHERE IS Ralph WALDO Emerson?"

TO BE CONTINUED... 

A Baron, Fried Chicken & Trailblazing

There were two of us "souls" on this twin-engine Beechcraft Baron, the pilot and me. The pilot was my dear friend Steve--an excellent pilot by the way; thank God. We had just taken off from Boise, Idaho, headed for Portland, Oregon. The air-traffic controller comes on the radio and says something like, "I'll be losing radio contact with you for awhile, give me your vital information." So Steve says, "There are two souls on board." and gives our names, the phone numbers of our next-of-kin, etc.

We're over the Rockies, presumably, the clouds are so thick you can't see tomorrow. Then Steve says, "That's not good!"

Two people you never want to hear that from: your pilot and your doctor.

The crisis involved the plane's wings and props beginning to ice up. Long story; happy ending. After all, I'm sitting here typing this on a lovely Saturday morning with a good cup of coffee.

There are those moments for us "men of a certain age" when we wonder what kind of mark we're leaving. Not to sound morbid (and for the record, I'm feeling great), but one of these days, when your funeral is over and family and friends are back at the church eating fried chicken, potato salad and German chocolate cake. What will they talk about?

He was funny. He talked a good game. He was rather arrogant and self-obsessed; after all who writes a blog 'all ABOUT me' other than the Pioneer Woman and young, hipster women who post pictures of their cats and their food?

Worse yet, what if the only thing they talk about is how good the chicken is?

So, what would I want people to say? I've given that some thought. It's a work in progress, but so far I have this: He was funny. He loved his family and they knew it. He spoiled his grand-girls so rotten they now all have blogs with huge followings, where they post a lot of selfies. And, he was a trail-blazer.

My inspiration for this new vision is this line from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Let me say right now, I love the sentiment in this, but I have a few issues with Ralph's rhetoric. More on that in the next post.

To be continued...