Notes from Maine - 2023/05/07
Mom is here. She’s currently surveying her gardens, trying to figure out a plan of attack. Time is so short. With only three weeks allotted for this visit, every moment counts. We have tons of projects to finish at Dad’s house as well. Wrapping up the little details before the house goes on the market is top priority. The house looks wonderful. I’m sure someone will be very happy to discover it.
I’m inspired to begin another medium sized project now at my house. It has been a while. I’ll have to find a project that requires learning a new skill. That’s always the key that unlocks my drive. If I can find something that’s outside my current skillset, I’ll be compelled to dive in.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m patient enough for classroom learning. I never got the hang of it when I was a kid. I skated through most of school just with intuition. Later, I would daydream all day and then try to work things out on my own when I got home. Homework was where I did most of my discovery. In order to finish an assignment, I would have to go through the textbooks, page by page, recreating all the lectures that went in one ear and out the other. Now, I learn a lot of things from YouTube videos. I skip past all the boring stuff and then repeat the key moments until I understand. I might even be able to sit still for actual classes. I’ve taken a few Spanish classes in recent years, but I have to admit that I spent a lot of that lecture time doing exercises in the textbook during the boring moments. Aside from having a venue where I was forced to express myself in Spanish, I don’t know how much I got out of it.
If I could go back in time, I’m not sure I would anything differently in school. I’m still mystified why they put any kids through that system. It feels like systematic torture. Maybe the real purpose is just to prepare young people for the systematic torture of working.
My apologies if you are or were a teacher. I’m sure most teachers are doing extraordinary work with all the best intentions. The system itself needs an overhaul in my opinion.
I would like to tell my younger self some things that I think are really key. The first one is this: don’t be afraid to take chances, but weigh the risks and rewards first.
One day, when I was about twenty, I went down to the river on a really hot day to cool off. I stood on the bank in a spot where we’d never swam before. I could see the rocky bottom—it was just a few feet deep. Instead of lowering myself to the rocks and easing in, I just decided to jump. It was a couple of feet. The big toe on my right foot landed first, squarely on a piece of broken glass. It split my toe in two, right down to the bone. I pulled myself out of the water, called to my friends, and limped back across the field to my car, picking up a dozen ticks on the way. One of my friends drove directly to the hospital while I held my foot together with a towel. It took a bunch of stitches to put everything together again.
With just a tiny amount of effort, I would have gotten into the water without injury.
I wonder if someone could have whispered in my ear that morning and convinced me to take a little more care. Sometimes, risky behavior is completely worthwhile. In that situation, I was saving ten seconds by jumping in, but I ended up not being able to swim in the river for a month. It was a valuable lesson, taught in a very direct manner. Could there have been a less damaging way for me to understand that same point? I like to think that I was smart enough to listen to reason back then. You could argue that it was just an unfortunate accident that could have happened to anyone. Maybe.
The year after that accident, I went swimming in the same river with my friends, Clay and Frank. It had been raining for days but the weather that afternoon was finally clear and beautiful. As we sat on the rocks, almost all the way across the river, we didn’t hear the klaxon that sounded to warn that the dam was opening upstream. Honestly, I never heard that klaxon once in all the time I swam there. I’m not convinced that it was real. The rising water was very real. The three of us made it back to shore hundreds of yards downstream from where we started. One young person (we didn’t know) didn’t make it. They washed up miles downstream eventually. When we got to shore, there were police cars and ambulances on the scene looking to make a rescue, but they were too late.
Did I learn a lesson that day? I don’t know. It was the first time I really felt mortal, I guess. It felt more like a shift in maturity than knowledge acquired.
As I said before, a lot of my learning now comes from YouTube. I’m also experiencing the world through Instagram at the moment. My friend, Emilio, is walking the Camino de Santiago. He flew to Spain to walk from Burgos to Santiago de Compostela. It should take about three weeks to cover hundreds of miles (hundred of kilometers). While he’s walking, he posts about his trip on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/emiliocaminando/
It looks like an amazing journey. I’m happy to read about it from the comfort of my couch.
I still take risks. Working with big, dumb horses is a constant risk that I’m more than willing to undertake. I like them enough to suffer the occasional bruise or sprain. That’s about the limit for me. Everything else will have to come to me in YouTube videos.
