Good Bones

 

Even though my kids are grown, I think a lot about being a parent.  I did some things right; lots of things wrong. I did my best in view of what I knew at the time.

I ran across this poem, which I love.  I am posting it in case it might resonate with others.

Good Bones, by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I've shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I'll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.  

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, 

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind 

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children.  I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, 

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones. This place could be beautiful, 

right? You could make this place beautiful.

Core Principles

 

As I have stumbled through my life, I struggled to find a set of principles that would provide some guidance and comfort.  I read a lot of treatises on self-improvement, success, etc. - not much resonated.  I went to various churches even though I was not a believer.  I didn't find anything for me in those spaces.  In the past few years, I became acquainted with the 12 Steps.  They have been quite helpful, but the Steps are pretty generic.  I felt a need for a list that spoke to me personally.  So I wrote my own Core Principles.  Here they are:

• Always deal fairly with others. Negotiate fiercely, reach agreement expeditiously and follow through as promised.  Remember that turnabout is fair play, so integrity is not only the moral path - it is the safe path.
• Be a fiscal conservative. Don't borrow money that you can't pay back.
• Be independent.  Don't expect others to take care of you.  Friendship, love relationships and economic connections are helpful at times, but self-reliance is the source of true contentment.
• Be clear-eyed.  If you must judge others, do so based on their actions, not their appearance or background.
• Avoid proselytism.  Never, ever try to push your religious beliefs down the throats of other people.
• Always pause first.  Resist impulsive words and actions.  Take a breath and think for a minute, or ten.
• Cherish existence. Recognize that humans live for a very short time. Try not to waste that time.
• Recognize capacity constraints.  Don't take on burdens you can't carry.  Collapsing won't help anyone.
• And perhaps the most important thing - listen to lots of great music. Play and/or sing some, too.

These 10 principles work for me when I remember to follow them.  When I am mindful of this list, I am calmer and my level of self-loathing drops.  I have a code to live by.

Perspective

One of my favorite forms of reflection is to review the known timeline of our planet and then compare that to the timeline of Homo Sapiens.  

Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago.  The first single-celled life form (Prokaryotic Archaea) appeared on our planet about 4.1 billion years ago (and these organisms are still around).  Multi-cellular life forms appeared 2.1 billion years ago.  The earliest land animals (semi-aquatic amphibian tetrapods) crawled out of the oceans 350 million years ago.  The mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs happened 66 million years ago.  The first primates showed up 55,000,000 years ago, and the precursor to humans finally appeared 7 million years ago.  The first "real human" evolved in Africa 2.8 million years ago, and it took 1 million years for their descendants to begin migrating from Africa to other places.  The first confirmed controlled use of fire by humans happened 1 million years ago.  The first emergence of our species, Homo Sapiens, occurred 315,000 years ago.  

So for 93% of the Earth's history, there were no recognizable humans walking the planet. Oh, and the first "anatomically modern" version of Homo Sapiens evolved 46,000 years ago, so we could say that humans that resembled the current crop of people have only been around for 1% of the earth's history.  Humans are new,  and our share of the geologic time arc is quite small.

But we think we are The Most Important Thing To Ever Happen on Planet Earth. Hmmm...maybe not.  

For sure, Homo Sapiens has proliferated.  The population has grown exponentially over the past 5,000 years (from 50 million about 4,800 years ago to 7.8 billion today).  For sure, we have used the weirdly large frontal lobes of our brain to invent heaps of shit and organize massive groups of individuals into religions, nations and empires.  For sure, we have obliterated thousands of  species (sabre-tooth tigers, wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths, dodo birds, passenger pigeons, and on & on). And we have created conditions to allow other species to flourish (dogs, livestock, etc.).  

But the planet motors on, and will continue for 3 to 7 billion years before the sun turns into a Red Giant and burns it to a sad, lifeless rock.  Homo sapiens probably won't be around to see the end of days.  Good old Mother Earth has quite a lot of life left no matter what we pesky humans might do before we join the list of extinct species.

Yeah, we ain't that important.  We are just another successful animal that has experienced a population explosion.  We will eventually join the dinosaurs and the dodo bird.  

This is what I turn to when my panties are in a bunch over politics, or I can't figure out how to play a Big Walter lick on my harmonica.  In the end, it's all pretty insignificant, so no need to worry too much.

Wintering, 2021 - Galena IL & Davenport IA

 

I am writing this on a Sunday morning from a room on the 4th floor of a Hampton Inn in Davenport, Iowa.  The window overlooks the parking lot of a shopping center.  Because of the Covid-19 crisis, the parking lot is empty.  Davenport has had quite a lot of snow recently, and now the temperature has plunged - currently sitting at 15 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The parking lot looks deadly in the thin grey morning light.  I saw a couple of burly guys struggle to free a tow truck stuck in that parking lot last night.

About a week ago, I was in Galena and rented a cabin in the woods.  The snow hit, and I took a picture of the deck off the kitchen - the pic is at the top of this post.  I couldn't get out of the joint for several hours - a snowdrift blocked the door and there was no snow shovel. The managers of the property cleared it away around lunchtime.  I was happy to be trapped, surrounded by the winter's hush in the woods.

I am now visiting one of my adult children who is currently staying in Davenport.  It isn't a bad place - the pace is a lot slower than Chicago, and the folks here see things much differently than us urbanites.  The good citizens of Davenport have declared that the pandemic is over - the restaurants and bars were packed last night, and mask discipline is pretty weak.  That's why I split a take-out pizza with my kid in the hotel room last night.

Lots of mid-sized cities have interesting histories, and Davenport is no exception.  Davenport is a river town; the Mississippi is its major geographic feature.  River towns tend to be kind of racy.  Davenport had a lot of bordellos and speakeasies during the Prohibition years, and once was called "the wickedest city in America" by the national press.  It is also Bix Beiderbecke's hometown.  If you have never heard of Bix, that's OK - he is not well-known to the general public.   He was a giant of the jazz cornet in the 1920's.  You may have heard Royal Garden Blues, considered one of the most important jazz recordings in history.  Bix was a tragic character.  He drank himself to death in his Queens, New York apartment in the summer of 1931.  He was only 28 years old when he died. So Davenport has the Bix Beiderbecke Museum downtown near the Mississippi River.  There is a Bix festival and many other Bix-related organizations and events here.  Davenport also was the location of America's first college of chiropractic medicine. You can lay factoid that on your chiropractor when you visit for your next adjustment.

I am here to spend time with my adult offspring.  I won't bore you with the details, but this child of mine has been struggling.  I love this young person to death and I am here to help if possible.  I have no idea how things will turn out.  I know if I force an outcome, things probably won't improve.

I have no power over anyone else's actions or reactions.  I only have control over my own actions and reactions.  Even that is sometimes more than I can handle.

The sun is breaking through the cloud cover now, so I will head out to see what Davenport has in store for me today.