Tag: unpredictability

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Unexpected Lives

When I found out that my immunization period would end on May 4, I joked that it was perfect for a geek like me.  International Star Wars Day – “May the Fourth Be With You” – what better time to wrap things up?

But lately, it’s not a John Williams theme I’ve been hearing. And that’s appropriate, too.

You see, while the mainstream world knows this time as the day before Cinco de Mayo and the would-be Jedi flood the internet with Star Wars memes, musicians know that there’s another meaning to 5/4. It’s a rhythm, and  a tricky one for many people to feel. Compared to the steady walk of a 4/4 or the lilting waltz of a 3/4, it sounds offbeat, like there’s a slight hitch in it, even though it’s completely regular.

Only a few 5/4 pieces are well known to the general public. But one of them is very well known indeed.

You know it as the “Mission: Impossible” theme.

“Bum, bum, BUM-BUM; bum, bum, BUM-BUM …”

Heather and I have had a lot of Mission: Impossible on lately – not the Tom Cruise movies, but the old 1960s and ‘70s TV show where a team of sharp-witted agents had to think their way through a sensitive assignment. Instead of the abilities of James Bond, an Impossible Missions Team relied on the skills of the con man: planning, misdirection and an ability to steer an over-eager mark into engineering their own doom.

The structure was completely predictable and easy to parody. The team leader would get the latest assignment, “should you choose to accept it,” on a self-destructing recording. He’d assemble his team of experts – usually the same ones every time, unless a guest star was in store – and then put together an elaborate plot of fake identities, careful timing and a little technological magic.

And every single time – EVERY single time – that careful plot would go off the rails halfway through, if not earlier, requiring the team to improvise.

Does that last part sound familiar?

For more than a year, we’ve been living unexpected lives. OK, it’s fair to say that life is never utterly predictable (John Lennon did say “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”), but most of us aren’t used to the disruptions being quite this relentless. We’ve had to rewrite how we work, how we learn, how we live … not just once, but over and over.

It’s dizzying. Even infuriating to some. Certainly tiring. Constant alertness, constant adaptation can exhaust anyone.

But two realities from the old show are also in play for us.

The first is that survival and success require a team. We’re not in a Hollywood world where one superstar can save the day, no matter how powerful or famous that person might be. It needs all of us, looking out for all of us, doing what we need to do together.

The second? Simple. The team’s success was never based on “Did the plan anticipate everything?” It was “Did we accomplish the mission?”

We’ve learned. We’ve adjusted. Sometimes we’ve failed. And we certainly won’t see quite the same “normal” at the other end of the pandemic as we did at the start. But as long as we reach that other end, still together, still finding a way to do what we must … then we’ve succeeded.

It hasn’t been easy. But it can be done. Like a certain theme, we all feel a little offbeat, but we are moving forward.

You might even say we’re heading Fourth.

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Looking From The Edge

It started with the rope.

Maybe you remember what I’m talking about, if you took grade-school PE in the 1970s and 1980s. The long floor-to-ceiling rope in the gymnasium, suspended over a safety mat. The one that students were expected to climb like Tarzan at some point in their elementary school careers.

Correction. The one that most students were expected to climb. I was given an exemption because, well, childhood epilepsy and dangling from a line like Spider-Man don’t mix really well.

Danger anticipated. Danger avoided.

Now fast-forward several years to junior high school. Specifically, to the various track-and-field games in gym. Unlike ropes, long jumps were perfectly safe for an epileptic and I tried over and over again with all the enthusiasm that a nerdy and awkward adolescent could manage.

Maybe a little too much enthusiasm. The sore feet I had after class didn’t go away. It turned out that between that, and maybe some after-school martial arts classes, I had managed to break the growth plates in both my feet.

Danger not even considered.

So what’s the point of all this rambling, besides setting the stage for the Totally-Not-Plagiarized-Diaries-of-a-Sorta-Wimpy-And-In-No-Way-Copyright-Infringing Kid? Well, to start with, it never hurts to remember the limits of our expectations – how, as the adage goes, we don’t know what we don’t know. For all that we plan and foresee and calculate, some things simply aren’t on the radar because we didn’t know to put them there.

But oh, do we try. Especially at the New Year.
The fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett had characters who were drawn to “edge places,”  points where two states of being come together, like doors, or masks, or mirrors, or even theatres. Similarly, something about the boundary between an old year and a new one draws us.  It’s a time when we look back and look forward, when writers everywhere compile their “10 best” and “10 worst” lists, when we try to anticipate what’s next – aside from freezing weather and drivers who shouldn’t be on the roads, of course.

I don’t want to make this sound too idealistic. Many years, the look back is on the level of “Thank heaven THAT’s over” and the look ahead is more like “Well, it can’t be as bad as what we just went through.” But we still like to think we have some sort of control over the outcome. That’s why we make resolutions, right?

We like to think that. Until we get sore feet.

As some of you know, this last year for me has gone beyond unpredictable. It’s had some amazing joys and some crushing blows, and my regular readers have experienced many of them with me. And one of the most challenging lessons I’ve had to take from all of it is that there is only so much I can do.

That’s not the same as saying “There’s nothing I can do.” That’s a trap. Saying “I can’t do everything” isn’t the same as saying “I can’t do anything.” Hope demands effort, otherwise it’s nothing more than an optimistic dream.

But we do have to accept that we’re not the ones in the driver’s seat.

And that’s hard.

We can prepare. We can anticipate. We can make the most of our chances. We can set ourselves up really, really well. But some things will always be out of our control.

In an odd way, though, that can be kind of hopeful.

It means that we don’t have to blame ourselves for every catastrophe in life. Not as much as we want to.

It means that totally unexpected blessings can find us in life. However undeserving of them we may feel personally.

It means we can let ourselves heal. And wonder. And grow.

And that we can reach out to each other as we do so.

Keep reaching. Keep growing. Take the pains and the wonders of this new year as they come. And where you can act, do it with hope.

After all, it never hurts to know the ropes.

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A Mighty Wind

I admit it, I brag pretty shamelessly on Colorado. I’ll talk up the mountains, I’ll cheer on the Broncos, I’ll even fill in a newcomer on our weather’s four seasons – as in 6 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. and midnight. But there’s one area where I have to admit that my “second home state” of Kansas has us beat.

Wind.

I know, Colorado gets gusts. Pretty good ones, too. But Kansas gets wind. The name means “People of the South Wind” and they ain’t kidding. Never mind the tornadoes that sent Dorothy to Oz, it’s the straight-line winds that’ll carry off Auntie Em, Uncle Henry and Toto, too, if you’re not careful. I’m talking about a mass of moving air matched only by the collective filibusters of the United States Senate, with a presidential speechwriter or two thrown in.

That big.

I think about it most at this time of year. March and April are known in Western Kansas as the “blow season,” the time of year when you really didn’t need the shingles on your roof … or the homework in your hands … but you probably did need that dent in your car from the door that blew open next to you. It’s a time when wind can grab a headline all by itself – and just about anything else that isn’t nailed down securely.

Maybe a bit of Kansas blew inside me, too. Because “blow season” remains a time when I can look for my own winds of change. And usually find them.

It was during my first blow season 16 years ago when I became a Kansan, a reporter and a fiancé all in the same week.

It was at that time of year five years ago that I gained my brother-in-law Jay and lost my grandmother-in-law Val on the same day.

Three years ago, the winds carried us to Missy, Heather’s developmentally disabled aunt. We moved in her with that April, became her guardians not long after, and – well, “change” is too small a word for everything that’s happened since. So is “wonderful.”

That’s the thing about wind. It doesn’t let things rest. It upends them, frees them, forces them to move, often in directions no one could predict.

When we notice, it’s mostly the inconvenience; the trash bin that got blown over, say, or the old aspen that was finally born down. It’s human nature. We grumble, even on the rare occasions when we think of the big picture. (Theatrical voiceover: “It was a world without a breeze … without a season … without a hope. Columbia Pictures brings you a Joel Schumacher film. Gone … With The Wind.”)

We need to be stirred up. Even if we’d never admit it.

Granted, that sort of change isn’t limited to March and April, any more than big wind is. But it’s not bad to have a time when it’s in your face, a season when you have to think about it. To be reminded that we only determine so much – and that that can be a good thing.

Good or not, it’s a wind we have to ride.

I’ll try to remember that as the windows rattle and my sinuses scream with the shifting air of our own Colorado gusts. Today’s blast of wind may be tomorrow’s welcome rainstorm.

Or, perhaps, tomorrow’s snowstorm.

After all, this is March on the Front Range. And the next season is due any hour now.