The burdens we carry and the obstacles we face are often the only ones we can really feel.   The struggles of others have an air of unreality, do not seem as substantial as the things that hang over our tired backs, have us in their teeth.   This is obvious, self-evident, as my man The Author of Liberty used to say.  Who can tell what burdens and obstacles that great man faced, with his inherited wealth and hundreds of human chattel depending on him as he birthed the glorious ideas of Democracy and Freedom?

Bitterness is not becoming, and so let’s let it fall by the wayside, whatever and wherever that may be.  My point here is that any of us can give a laundry list of the reasons we are struggling to carry the heavy bag that is ours to carry.   If we can stop yawning long enough as we listen to somebody else’s list we may realize that we are not the only one feeling overwhelmed at certain times.  

To me the worst of it is the feeling that this uphill path, with the heavy load on the shoulders, is endless, while our strength and life are limited.  That combined with everyone else chatting about everything else, as we soldier on alone, pretending all’s well, you know what I’m saying?  

The true fact is that we are capable of way more than we allow ourselves to try.  In a sense the human mind, properly engaged, is unlimited.   It is the hundred limitations we impose that is a big part of the tragedy, the crap we accept instead of vital, technicolor life.   That and the fact that, except on rare occasions, it’s really hard to give more than a passing fiddler’s fart about the catalogue of other people’s persistent, amorphous struggles.

My mother’s last trip to her oncologist was a perfect example.  The doctor retired soon after the visit, shortly before my mother died.  He looked sort of dazed most of the time, sometimes lost key details of the patient’s particular cancer during an examination.   He acted like too many patients dying on him might have taken their toll, though he was trim, polite and ran a flourishing practice.  He could have been the sort who retires and dies a week later chasing a tennis ball.  But that day he was as focused and straightforward as I’d ever seen him, and so was my mother in her way.

“What’s the good news?” asked my mother with a cheery, girlish inflection.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any good news today,” said the shifty eyed oncologist.

“Then I don’t want to hear it.  I don’t want any more bad news!” she said.  The oncologist deftly shifted the conversation to other subjects and what was left unsaid was never said, until my mother looked at Sekhnet from her hospice bed and asked “how can I say goodbye to such a sweet face?”

And so it seems to be with this gentle, brilliant man we spent a few days with this weekend.   He looks shockingly bad, much worse than he did two and a half months ago, and he looked horrible then.  It is the darkness around the mouth that is most disturbing to me, but many aspects of his looks are disturbing.   He is weak but determined, in pain but uncomplaining.  Sekhnet kept asking if he wanted help and he kept telling her he didn’t, though things were difficult for him and it was also hard to watch him struggle.   It was important for him to struggle, and we could easily see this.  This struggle is called life.

“His memory is perfect and he’s brilliant and still remarkably mild and kind,” you could say, and you’d be right.  He was telling me about a baseball stadium trip he took with his son-in-law, a man with Asperger’s Syndrome, as far as we can tell.  It’s hard to gauge an expression, looking at the son-in-law.  He is the proverbial two eyes, a nose and a mouth.  He looks vaguely sad all the time, and he speaks very little.  A brilliant guy, from what I hear, and he and the man we visited, who looks like Death walking painfully as an exhausted but resolute man, grew very close.  In 2002 they set off, during inter-league play, to catch baseball games in 8 cities: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, Minneapolis… I’d have to look at the map to give you the eighth.  3,700 miles in ten days, they saw 15 or 16 teams play, there may have been one repeat, he doesn’t recall off-hand a decade later, and, really, what difference does it make?

It was apparently not hard for this pair of shrewd baseball fans to map their journey.  They took the schedule, inputted the games and locations into a spread sheet and tweaked it a few times.  It took under an hour.  And then they were off.  Hard to imagine their conversations during the average 370 miles driving a day, but knowing the man we visited and his almost limitless range of interests, I’m sure they had plenty to talk about.  One bond they had was their love of the man’s oldest daughter.  The future son-in-law lived in their house for a year or more before the wedding.  He was clearly the son the man had never had, growing up with his hard-working wife and three daughters.  The two are very close.

“We may do it again this August during inter-league,” the man said with an almost imperceptible smile playing across his wasted face.  Then he looked off slightly and said “maybe we won’t…I’m not sure yet, ” and his voice trailed off just a little.

Mind pondering a dozen interlocking puzzles, it would take a stronger will than mine to get to sleep.  A passing thought about the winning combination of mildness and great intelligence of our dying host, the comfortable bed might as well be a trampoline, but not because our host appears so near the end.  Sekhnet is taking in and whooshing out the deep, puffing breaths of exhausted sleep, I’m  out from under the covers, doing a little staccato tapping, trying to get some thoughts arranged here, and out of my head.

Unleashing creativity is blessed work and I hope one day it will pay a few salaries (with a health plan) and spread from kid to kid, skills mastered and taught to other kids.  Proving what every adult knows, but so often forgets– kids are capable of many amazing things- and all of their creativity will be needed to avert the impending many-headed disasters that loom and leer, while greed gloats, and amasses weapons to defend its prerogatives. Meantime, how to get them to really care about their creations?  They are like the wanton gods in Shakespeare who create with indifference and tire quickly of their playthings.  Some call out for more structure, others need less.  My faith in their powers makes me forget sometimes that this one is only 7, that the oldest is only 11.  That they are also childish is something I need to not forget.  How to nudge them the right way, get them to refine their ideas and collaborate while leaving them free to invent and run things is one piece of the puzzle I turn like a kid playing with a loose molar, pushing it every possible way.

The most essential puzzle now is how to get a key number of bright, undistracted adults into the room with these animating kids and afterwards help me to make this delicate new being into a sturdier creature that will walk this troubled world with a light and whimsical step, stomping hard when necessary, but never causing harm.

Lack of empathy, one finds, is epidemic in our modern rat race world.  It’s a defining feature of our terminally distracted times, I would say.   Flip the channels, virtually every station features competitive zero sum games with one winner and everyone else losing.   An inadvertently dismissive or hurtful comment often comes from the same distracted place:   I’m telling you how it looks to me and I’m too overwhelmed by my own problems to consider how my observation will effect you, how it would effect me if someone offered it in response to my situation.

Which, for example, is the voice of reason?  

One says, very convincingly, that this idea of mine, creating a place where kids can talk and play, and be listened to, while working on complicated projects that require them to work as a team, has great value and is exactly the right thing for me to be working on.  The program has the ability to rescue some kids, the invisible collateral damage of a society that doesn’t blink when millions grow up doomed in our wealthy nation.  It really seems to be what I should be doing, personally.   After all, it calls so many of my skills and talents into play and challenges me to master skills I don’t have.  I am also probably the ideal adult to help the kids, and show others how to,  I can help with every aspect of it: talking, listening, drawing, editing, playing music, making jokes, etc.   Plus, I am calm and reasonable and quick on my feet.   It is only a matter of time, fine-tuning and recruiting a few good people and this program could really take off.  It could help a lot of kids and demonstrate a lot about intrinsic motivation, the power of the imagination, creativity on learning,  inventing and solving problems.  And, tragically, these crucial abilities go largely untapped in a world that has never needed them more.

Every other day another voice speaks just as convincingly and tells me, with no equivocation, that my idea is a day dream that I, personally, have no hope of being able to flesh out enough to bring into the world as an ongoing program or business.   Yes, the kids often have fun, sure they’ve occasionally done some very promising animation, but that only makes me a good day camp counselor and not any kind of social entrepreneur, educational theorist, Founder or businessman.

Rarely do these competing voices compromise.  Although the truth will turn out to be full of gradations, and colored by both of these points of view, in this internal debate it’s often all black or it’s all  white, just like the real world, as argued about by partisan idiots.  Both points of view are categorical– one saying “if you will it, it is no dream” and the other snorting.  “Right, quote Herzl, idiot.  If you dream it, it is a dream.”

The answer is, strictly speaking, neither of the above, and answering it correctly will require a steady struggle.  If I believe steadfastly enough, and work hard enough (and the work is hard, no debate there), and take satisfaction and inspiration from every small advance, learn enough key things I don’t know now, it is quite possible that the program could grow into something like what I envision.   If I am fearful enough, and distracted enough, and dogged enough by the often sorry history of unrealized things I’ve dreamed of, well, certain failure is no fear, it’s guaranteed.   A man without a smiling face should not open a shop.  If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything.  The best throw of the dice is to throw them away (found in a cookie at Hop Kee, circa 1974).  I know you are, but what am I?

“You always covered your ass,” my mother observed once, in a conversation about risk we had when I was already a grown man, not entirely approving of her son’s general caution, displayed consistently since I was a very young child.   Our society rewards the boldness of daring risk-takers, so does nature.  Going out on a limb can be an expression of boldness or fear, it depends on how or why it’s done.  The limb can break and you may too, chasing something just out of reach or falling into deadly jaws while clinging desperately one small step ahead of a predator.

The title of this post is also ridiculous.  Nobody knows how the story ends.  The only certain thing is that they’ll throw dirt over a box containing your remains, or store you in a vase, or sprinkle your dust to return to the dust from which you came.   Or bag you and toss your bones.  Or some other variation on what the world does with a dead person.   If you lived right, and touched people in a loving way, rather than being mean, selfish, petty and greedy, your memory will be a blessing.  Otherwise, what can you say?  A thousand people at his funeral, including reporters, many sobbing.  As for the guest of honor?  He can’t even sigh.

Dominic, the indomitable dog hero of the great William Steig’s book Dominic, met an alligator headed woman, a fortune teller, at a fork in the road, not long after he set out from his nice home seeking the adventure of his life.  The witch told him that one road led to things she could describe to him, pretty good things, it seemed.  The other road?  She really couldn’t say, beyond that it would be an adventure.  Our hero did not hesitate, nor seek to find out what was behind door number one, he went down the second road.

And the rest, as they say, is history.