Category Archives: past

On do-overs

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While visiting childhood haunts this past summer, returning to a town I haven’t lived in for almost thirty years, I was assailed by a series of memories that left me wanting a do-over or two. Nostalgia is a terrible thing. If you don’t remember the do-over, it was a special anti-mulligan that gave you grace after something went wrong in the game you were playing. Perhaps it was a pitch behind you, or an extra at-bat or just a repeat of a situation that went wrong, maybe a fourth strike. How many times since our childhoods have we needed a do-over? I think it is an inherent part of the human condition to do everything wrong: pick the wrong job, eat the wrong food, choose the wrong car, date the wrong person, and all the while it seemed like we were doing the right thing. It’s as if as children we understand the falibility of the human condition, so we make amends by invoking the do-over. Unfortunately, as adults, we cannot invoke the do-over and must live with all of our mistakes. We desperately need the do-over, but all we can do is lament our terrible decision making from hindsight, which cruelly hangs the correct decision in front us as if we were Tantalus staring at those unobtainable apples, that unreachable water. We hunger for a perfect life filled with perfect decisions, but we have to live with what we have, no do-overs allowed.

On do-overs

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While visiting childhood haunts this past summer, returning to a town I haven’t lived in for almost thirty years, I was assailed by a series of memories that left me wanting a do-over or two. Nostalgia is a terrible thing. If you don’t remember the do-over, it was a special anti-mulligan that gave you grace after something went wrong in the game you were playing. Perhaps it was a pitch behind you, or an extra at-bat or just a repeat of a situation that went wrong, maybe a fourth strike. How many times since our childhoods have we needed a do-over? I think it is an inherent part of the human condition to do everything wrong: pick the wrong job, eat the wrong food, choose the wrong car, date the wrong person, and all the while it seemed like we were doing the right thing. It’s as if as children we understand the falibility of the human condition, so we make amends by invoking the do-over. Unfortunately, as adults, we cannot invoke the do-over and must live with all of our mistakes. We desperately need the do-over, but all we can do is lament our terrible decision making from hindsight, which cruelly hangs the correct decision in front us as if we were Tantalus staring at those unobtainable apples, that unreachable water. We hunger for a perfect life filled with perfect decisions, but we have to live with what we have, no do-overs allowed.

On randomness

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The nature of a random event is both complex and chaotic, but again, predictable in a certain way. When you flip a coin, the result is both random and predictable because you will get either a head or a tail, but never know which one since all events are individual and isolated, independent, and do not foreshadow in any real way what the next result might be. Sometimes we use the word “random” to refer to unpredicted outcomes such as rain shower on a sunny day or an unannounced visit from weird Aunt Hortensia who normally lives in Portland but just happens to be in Minnesota for the weekend for no apparent reason. Nevertheless, neither the rain nor the visit are random, being more a part of predictable chaotic patterns to which we may not be privy. They seem “random” but if we had more information, we would understand how they might be “strange,” but certainly not random. Teenagers love to abuse this word to describe events that seem tangential or extraneous to them, but then again, it’s because they don’t see a bigger picture. The idea of randomness has bothered me every since I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1927) which tells the story of a number of people who are killed when a bridge collapses. “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below,” but is any of it random? The people are relatively unrelated and their stories and lives are all incredibly different, but they all die together when the bridge collapses. The question that the novel proposes, I suppose, is the random nature in life’s events–is there a meaning to it all or is it all random? How was it that those five people were all on the bridge at the same time and that the bridge decided to fail at that moment. At the end of Conan Doyle’s “The Cardboard Box,” Holmes remarks, “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” […] “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.” So sometimes, life looks really, really, random, even when, perhaps, it’s not.

On randomness

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The nature of a random event is both complex and chaotic, but again, predictable in a certain way. When you flip a coin, the result is both random and predictable because you will get either a head or a tail, but never know which one since all events are individual and isolated, independent, and do not foreshadow in any real way what the next result might be. Sometimes we use the word “random” to refer to unpredicted outcomes such as rain shower on a sunny day or an unannounced visit from weird Aunt Hortensia who normally lives in Portland but just happens to be in Minnesota for the weekend for no apparent reason. Nevertheless, neither the rain nor the visit are random, being more a part of predictable chaotic patterns to which we may not be privy. They seem “random” but if we had more information, we would understand how they might be “strange,” but certainly not random. Teenagers love to abuse this word to describe events that seem tangential or extraneous to them, but then again, it’s because they don’t see a bigger picture. The idea of randomness has bothered me every since I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1927) which tells the story of a number of people who are killed when a bridge collapses. “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below,” but is any of it random? The people are relatively unrelated and their stories and lives are all incredibly different, but they all die together when the bridge collapses. The question that the novel proposes, I suppose, is the random nature in life’s events–is there a meaning to it all or is it all random? How was it that those five people were all on the bridge at the same time and that the bridge decided to fail at that moment. At the end of Conan Doyle’s “The Cardboard Box,” Holmes remarks, “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” […] “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.” So sometimes, life looks really, really, random, even when, perhaps, it’s not.

On homecoming

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Tonight, the St. Peter Saints will play the Luverne Cardinals at 7 p.m. in St. Peter. St. Peter is celebrating its homecoming week and football game tonight, which means parades, homecoming queens and kings, getting out of class early, and an exciting football game to which alumni are invited once a year. Nostalgia is fun, but it doesn’t pay the mortgage. I have always thought that Thomas Wolfe was correct when he said you can’t go back home. Personally, I haven’t really lived in my hometown for over thirty years, so although I recognize the last names, a couple of generations of children have gone through the high school. I have more in common with the football players’ and cheerleaders’ grandparents than I do their parents. As the decades have dropped by, my hometown has changed a bit, but it has also stayed the same. Living in the past is a dead end. Homecoming is more fun for the high school kids than it is for the old alumni, and that is the way it should be. Kick-off is scheduled in about an hour, and the band will play, the cheerleaders will jump and scream, the young men will strap on their gear, and the students will file into the stadium to cheer on their team as they always have. Perhaps homecoming is there to remind us all that we have grown up, Peter Pan. I will not be there, just as I have never been there for the past thirty-six years. It’s always time to move on.

On homecoming

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Tonight, the St. Peter Saints will play the Luverne Cardinals at 7 p.m. in St. Peter. St. Peter is celebrating its homecoming week and football game tonight, which means parades, homecoming queens and kings, getting out of class early, and an exciting football game to which alumni are invited once a year. Nostalgia is fun, but it doesn’t pay the mortgage. I have always thought that Thomas Wolfe was correct when he said you can’t go back home. Personally, I haven’t really lived in my hometown for over thirty years, so although I recognize the last names, a couple of generations of children have gone through the high school. I have more in common with the football players’ and cheerleaders’ grandparents than I do their parents. As the decades have dropped by, my hometown has changed a bit, but it has also stayed the same. Living in the past is a dead end. Homecoming is more fun for the high school kids than it is for the old alumni, and that is the way it should be. Kick-off is scheduled in about an hour, and the band will play, the cheerleaders will jump and scream, the young men will strap on their gear, and the students will file into the stadium to cheer on their team as they always have. Perhaps homecoming is there to remind us all that we have grown up, Peter Pan. I will not be there, just as I have never been there for the past thirty-six years. It’s always time to move on.

On the past

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Spilled milk, water under the bridge, a crumbled cookie, all metaphors for things that have already irremediably happened for which there is no recourse. The past in a different country for which we lament and think fondly. In light of current circumstances we often feel encouraged to idealize the past, change it so the present feels less painful. In the past, people who may have been lost in some tragic way are still alive and we are still happy. I think all of the time travel stories in which people return to the past so that they can meet up with people who are long since passed away. The past can often be an illusory refuge, a temporal mirage, when we were happier, or more complete, or less lonely. There is almost always a time in the past that we idealize as some sort of golden age when everything was better, when the food was tastier, the wine, sweeter, the people, still alive. Current circumstances, often clouded by job, pressures, bills, circumstances, people, fears, and conflicts, never seem to bring together the requisite parameters that form that strange state we might call happiness. We fight deadlines, difficulties, and dead ends, we rage against the machine, only to find it is not the machine but the ghosts in it that make our current lives difficult. We risk everything by living in a past that never existed because it looks more appealing than getting up on any given morning and driving off into the rain. This is, of course, an illusion. The past is an illusion. Seldom are we either honest or sincere about how difficult our lives might have been in the past. We repress the sadness and the difficulties of the past without truly examining how problematic nature of the past. There are some who try to alter the present by invoking the past, especially when it comes to social change and the attempts by some to keep change from happening. Change is the only constant that links the past with the present, and change is the only unalterable facet of both the past and present that will continue into the future. People hate change, but change is inexorable, unavoidable, inevitable, like taxes and death. By trying to reclaim the past as some sort of golden, idyllic era of perfect values or ideal behavior, some people falsify what the past was all about. The problems that people might have today, they have always had–greed, envy, hate, jealousy, insecurity, ire, pride, sloth. Our oldest stories, even Cain and Abel, are about the those kinds of problems, and the story of Eden is the grandest venture into nostalgia that has ever been written or imagined, a perfect place which is never hot or cold, where the food is plentiful and tasty, where nothing is ever lacking. Nostalgia is phony prison of badly remembered times and reformulated memories that chain us to a fake existence that never really was in the first place. The only way the present is tolerable is if we see it through a clear crystal lens, rejecting rose-colored glasses and dark mirrors which change and deform the past in ways that change and deform our present. To live freely in the present, the past must be analyzed honestly and critically, and one must be willing to accept the change inherent in the passage of time. Yearning for a past that never really existed only serves to frustrate and weaken our sense of the present. So the past is past, and nothing can be done about changing it, but looking at it with a cold eye of objectivity may bring it to life and inform our present.