Decide

Leave a comment

Decisions we make when we’re young influence our entire lives.  It’s not that you can’t change course—I’ve seen it happen and it can be a thing of true beauty—but the fact is our young lives become our old lives, if we survive.  I’m now in my sixties.  I reflect a lot about my youth and the fact that I grew up in an uneducated, blue-collar family.  I had no idea what college was, and had not a minister convinced me that I might have the right stuff, I would probably never have gone.  It was foolish in a way.  My family contributed nothing financially—they couldn’t afford to.  I started with optimistic scholarships that eventually became less sanguine and I had to borrow more and more.  Once I’d begun on that path, however, turning back looked to be nothing but disastrous.

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

The internet allows us glimpses, only glimpses, into the lives of those we knew in our younger years.  Many of my surviving high school friends (and that number decreases every year now) have followed paths to their current situations.  I didn’t know them well, perhaps, but they too seemed set to follow in the courses of their lives.  I really hope they’re happy.  I hate to see anyone sad.  Still, there’s a melancholy captured well by a rabbi, who it is I can’t remember, who once said “You can either be wise or be happy.”  There’s an almost kabbalistic truth nestled in that sentiment, it seems.  Your rudder is small and the ocean is very, very big.  As a penurious boy living in an economically depressed refinery town, I never dreamed I’d have the privilege of living in Edinburgh for three years, with a wonderful wife, no less.  And yet, and yet.

The course of my life is not over yet (I hope).  Every day I make hundreds of decisions but none of them seem as momentous as the ones I made before I had seen much beyond rural western Pennsylvania.  I know this is true of others as well, reacting to the pain and angst of the moment, they turn to whatever gives them comfort.  For me it was books.  And church.  The course of a life.  And in a way that will only make sense of those who knew me in high school (none, or very few of whom ever read this blog), when I do my daily exercises, they always include twenty-two push-ups.  A number that, mystically, corresponds to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.  Way stations along a curriculum vita.

Spiritual Education

3 Comments

The water was hot. Notoriously hot. Our Junior High School had been built in the days of the prison esthetic, with heavy, cinderblock walls painted in penitent colors. And the water was famously hot. One of our gym teachers, nameless here forevermore, challenged us to be men. It takes a kind of courage mostly illegal these days to lecture a room full of naked boys, but he once came in during mandatory shower time to tell us that anyone who could hold their hand under the hot tap for a full minute would get an A in gym. Since he was an ex-Marine nobody was foolish enough to take him up on this challenge. At least not in my class. It’s difficult to be courageous when you’re unclothed.

The incident I recall, however, occurred at the opposite end of the spectrum, in art class. You may remember those days when you wove reed baskets to take home to your mom. The thing about reeds is that they’re brittle unless soaked in hot water. That was the key to working with them. Make them supple with hot water and then when they dried, they’d be remarkably sturdy, if somewhat lopsided. We had been weaving reed baskets when someone, unbeknownst to the teacher, had filled the sink with water as hot as our old school could deliver. Thinking it funny, since even in those days educational budgets were under threat, somebody dropped one of the very limited number of heavy reed-cutters into the sink, now at the very bottom of a basin of very hot water. I was not the guilty party; I don’t know who was. The drain was plugged from the bottom. Very funny, no?

At the end of class. the teacher was not amused. “No one leaves this room until that cutter is out of the water,” she flatly said. The first bell rang. She stood in front of the door. We would be late for the next period. Perhaps it is the weakness of character my religion instilled in me, but I’ve always had a great fear of not doing what I was told. It lingers to this day, that Fundamental unworthiness. This body of mere flesh is weak and prone to sinfulness. The clock was ticking. Teacher wanted the guilty party to suffer the price of their prank. I pulled up my sleeve, plunged my hand into the scalding water, pulled out the reed-cutter, slapped it on the counter, and walked out the door. We were released to class and the searing pain didn’t last long physically, but spiritually it has never gone away.