Talking to myself as I fill out forms for school

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can.

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed.

Sydney Smith, English essayist (1771 - 1845)

Trespassers Will

Remember how, in Winnie the Pooh, there is a sign at Piglet's house that says, "Trespassers W" which is thought to be Piglet's grandfather's name, which is Trespassers Will, which is short for Trespassers William? This post is a bit of thought about trespassers -- and invasions.

Before I post this stuff, I'd better make something clear. I'm not recommending lining the edges of your property with the upcoming sort of "I dare ya" signage. They just struck me funny, and they're good illustrations of what I'm talking about. Okay? Not advocating the signs for anyone to use. Not. However, in the name of fairness, I have made all the following versions of "keep out" linked to where I got them. Just click. No. Brace yourself, then click. Apparently there are some very paranoid people out there!

Now, that being said, here's how I used to think and feel about anything I considered to be within my own "territory" - my business - my life - my decisions. I thought I needed to make sure people got this message: Maybe it's a youthful thing? Maybe the young know their defenses to be easily breached? And ... admittedly, I was a somewhat intense and fierce young person. (Shocker, I know.) One of my favorite quotes back then was the quote I wrote in a journal back then as the motto of the French Foreign Legion.

If I falter, push me on.
If I stumble, pick me up.
If I turn back, shoot me.

Somehow, I needed to convince people that I meant it - no matter what it was.

Then I started to grow up.

And I started to realize that a lot of people don't trespass on purpose. They're just wandering around, and they're largely unaware that they've crossed any lines. (This happens in real life all the time - people wander through our property not realizing that the fact of a bunch of trees does not a federally managed, hiking trail rich, forest just for you make. I have to start the conversation with, "Did you know you're on private property?") Gradually, the edges of a basically defensive stance started to soften or wear off a bit, and I got as far as: This seemed a little more fair. In fact, I didn't need to say it that way at all. Usually it took the form of "if you don't want me to bite you, don't put your fingers in my mouth," or even the still less aggressive, "don't ask me if you don't really want an answer."

Then I got married, and had kids, and watched human people grow and develop and turn into adult human people. I kept my eyes open. I began to see that there were certain sorts of people likely to be invaded and trespassed upon, and certain sorts that nearly never had it happen to them. Oddly enough, the likelihood of invasion was nearly a perfect inverse to the defensive notices of the property owner! Folks who guard their lives with all that defensive stuff just end up inviting it!

The other sort that gets invaded is the sort who doesn't know where his own boundaries are. When the kids were still small, I saw a very interesting (and very helpful) expert talking about the children most vulnerable to predators. He made a good point. Babies tend to be very self-protective. But the more we insist that the child "kiss Uncle Harry" (whom they've never seen before in their young lives) or "give Aunt Janet a hug" (when Aunt Janet is a very scary person), the more we break down their natural defenses. Beating a child ... taking away the child's decision making experiences ... not telling the child when you're leaving but just sneaking out when he's not looking (what a horrid thing to do!) ... it all gives the child the sense that what the adults do is beyond the child's purview, and no objections will be attended. The child convinced of this is easy prey.

So ... if the people who walk their fences with guns slung over their shoulders, and the people who don't seem to be able to define their own boundaries are at greatest risk of invasion in human relationships, who's the least likely to have her life trespassed?

Well, think about it. Where do we hesitate to walk?
Would you be inclined to smash through that hedge and ride your bike in that lawn? Would you even go under that archway and up that path without express permission? And don't you want permission? It's graciously inviting - but not thrown open to any and sundry and all. Such a place calls us in, yet gives us an instant kind of politeness - simply because it's so well cared for.

That's who's "safe" -- the person who takes the most care over his own land is the least likely to be casually invaded or accidentally trampled. Good fences may make good neighbors, but someone's gotta build and maintain the things, right? And if the fence is a beautiful hedge? Then the territory's both inviting, and self-protecting. It invites rather than demands respect. It is, perhaps, one of the most loving things we can do to tend our own gardens.

Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh was born on October 28, 1903. His father was a man of letters and managing director of the firm of Chapman & Hall, who published Dickens and later Waugh himself; his brother Alec was a popular novelist who had an early success de scandal with a novel of public-school homosexuality.

From this comfortable, bookish background, he went to Oxford and fell in with the set of aesthetes and dilettantes - Brian Howard, Harold Acton - that used routinely to be described as having been "immortalised by Brideshead" but seem to have outstayed their welcome somewhat in the English cultural imagination, and are more likely nowadays to be portrayed as a gang of infantile snobs and wasters. Waugh's prospects after going down being rather poor, he took to school teaching, and his experiences gave him enough material to write his first novel, Decline and Fall, which came out in 1928. "I was driven into writing because it was the only way a lazy and ill-educated man could make a living," he wrote with cut-glass cynicism in The Daily Mail in 1937, continuing "I am not complaining about the wages. They always seem to me disproportionately high. What I mind so much is the work."

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate.
Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God
when the simple come into their kingdom.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts:
to construct and to refrain from destruction.

A theory of midlife

"Piglet, I have decided something."
"What have you decided, Pooh?"
"I have decided to catch a Heffalump."
(A.A. Milne)

Readers, I have decided something. (What have you decided, Recollected?) I have decided to embrace the shedding (if that's possible - hm. Release the shedding, maybe?)

It's my newest vision of a Midlife Done Well. I've started to see something, and here's what I think it is.

When we're young and small, lots of stuff can happen to us that might be damaging, might be helpful, or might be neither one. We have very little say about any of it, and it behooves the grownups to make a fence round about the saplings - an enclosure - so that they can grow and become strong enough not to need one.

But here's the deal. After that, after the enclosure has done its work, these beings who were planted within it are the sort of thing that must move and grow and change and suffer and exult and try things and succeed and fail. A lot of living has to happen to these mobile trees - or whatever they are. In my imagination, they look like eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus trees, walking about like the trees in Tolkein's imagination.

As they (we) grow and age and experience life, the grain and shape under our bark grow into the patterns of our lives and decisions. We do eventually become what we have been becoming.

When we are old, it shows. It shows in our body's posture, and it shows in the lines on our faces, and in the tones of our voices, and in our expectations about what we think is probably coming up next. Some of the old trees may then be found to be, after all, like the downed palms after a hurricane. Some of us turn out to be nothing but fiber and water, and like giant squash on the compost heap, some folks just dry up and disintegrate. These, I think, are folks too dependent on changeable weather conditions.

But others, the ones who've become strong and noble and fine in their age, those trees learn to take root in fertile ground. Like Sporos in Madeleine L'Engle's imagination, we must take root if we are to be free.

It's then - somewhere around midlife - that the trees seem to me to be dropping their bark. Up to now, they've needed this bark. Now it can be allowed to fall to the ground.

It's wonderful stuff, this self-protective bark. It has served its purpose well. It has protected the growth and well-being of the tree through all the previous eras of growth and change. And it is full of marvelous nutrients. When it falls to the ground it makes the surrounding soil fertile and refreshed and renewed. New little trees love the stuff! (Ever see a child with a happy grandparent?)

While we're younger - still looking for the soil in which we might take root - we need that bark. We have to weather the things that could destroy our inner selves if they were allowed to invade us. But once we're old enough to take root, we can let go of it. We no longer need to defend ourselves against the storms and chances and changes of this mortal life.

And under the bark sometimes we find a breathtaking beauty.

Facing the Future

This wonderful picture is from the wonderful blog, Copenhagen Cycle Chic, where the slogans are things like "Style Over Speed," and "Elegance Over Exertion." "All you need is a bike to take back the bike culture." And if you can get somebody to set you up on your daddy's bike, you can see a long, long way.