seanessay.com From Friday Free Fall writing
Prompt- changed opinions
The coulees around Lethbridge change to green with the blessed rain. Oh, one can curse the rain, expend energy in hunching shoulders and frowning eyes, but why? The same amount of rain still gets into you eyes and down your collar and into your shoes.
The grassy growth around the school buildings change, greening, growing, budding, shooting, colouring, fading to gossamer. Ripe yellow becomes grey becomes parachutes for children to blow.
To a child the world is new, opinions are new, and it doesn’t occur to them to change. Older children add to their “centre of the world” sensibility a belief of “knowing it all”—they make the best cultural revolutionaries, red guards and camp guards.
To an adult who has seen the boob tube go from greys to colour, from Route 66 where the youths learn about computer compilers, to Room 222 where the youth learn to make love not war, to 2001 where computer programers become software writers, and the compilers are still there, to lesbians becoming gays becoming lesbians again, to assimilation to preferring their own kind to assimilation again, to genocide, to raising one’s grey head and saying, “Am I the only one who has seen this fashion come around again?”
One begins to compile a view of history, that subject that makes youngsters fall asleep in class, a view that repeats chairman Mao’s views that “details become concepts.” One sees idealistic Maoists inspiring bomb threats in the sixties, Trumpism inspiring violence in recent years, and newly discovered graves, which were always known about, (even if the markers had decayed) inspiring vandalism and arson. Am I the only one to perceive that a “sincere” criminal is still a criminal? That if a mighty People’s Dictator says a crazy thing, it is still a crazy thing? No less than if it was the Pope or my dear mother.
The crazies are born unto us in every generation, right alongside the napoleons and the would-be napoleons, the idealistic chauvinists and the Teresas. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to fall asleep.
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Prompt- perfection requires practise
Ya, you can say that again. But you can’t say it of me. My best friends have some sort of practise, but still. I recall a long ago practicum where my advisor, a manager of a branch of the Boys’nGirls Club, said I could brainstorm something (I forget) everyday. Maybe ideas for goals and objectives. As I recall a small skeptical corner of my brain thought this was too silly, but still, mostly I felt small that such self discipline was beyond me. Although he later lost my respect, so maybe my skepticism was justified. This because he tossed a ball with another staff on a “parent and child” day, so it was left to me to get a soccer game going. This should have been a big red flag, but I didn’t mention it when two classmates expressed doubts about the man.
You can practise mental habits, such as accepting responsibility and stepping up to the plate, as I did that day. Start small, work up to bigger. In AA, certain people learn to practise rigorous honesty. Not just because alcohol has been for them “the lying disease,” but because they have never built up a practise of honesty.
A businessman once said, “Don’t con anybody. Not your boss, not your fellow executives and most importantly not yourself.” He also said that most people are not rigorously reliable: It seems the “A list” is very small, but you need to get yourself on it. Such is an excellent practise for the practise of management.
A quote from Orwell brings me a bitter comfort: “Most men’s lives, seen from within, are a series of defeats.” Yes. As a child I wouldn’t practise piano, later I made amends for that by very good practise. Now I am faltering with my practises for health and fitness. What I really need in this life is a practise of forgiveness. For me. No point in saying I am “supposed to be” more elite or snobbish than others—ya, but others, at least household names such as Stephen King, do practise more writing that me, they do…. Ya, but I am only me. With forgiveness, I can optimally fine tune my amount of work on writing: yes, that is a humble workable goal.
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Prompt- disappearing dreams
I never think about disappearing dreams as that would be something like looking back and second guessing myself. President Harry Truman never did so. “What would be the point?” he said.
I suppose it’s fun to write about your life the way writers fantasize about parallel worlds. There was that New Zealand movie about a lady, that got remade with Nicolas Cage in America, and that movie about the lady-hero in the movie Sliding Doors, but I don’t remember which country, and of course Mad Magazine once satirized It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart.
As for my own life, such figuring might lead to madness. Or to being mad at myself, since we humans have the power to abstract time that way. While we English, unfortunately, have a real poverty of using the “subjunctive” for entering the “imagination-state.” Ya, but at least we are practical and empirical. That last, “empirical,” is what a Columbian Ph.D. engineer told me about the British. He was there for his schooling, back in the day.
Joni Mitchel sang that there’ll be new dreams in her circle song, and yes, I think she has the right of it.
Know thyself means knowing when you are wimping out, or avoiding. Having said that, “—screw old dreams.” If business teaches us anything it’s the fallacy of “sunk costs.” Or as Drucker told the CEO of General Electric: “If you were not currently in this branch of business, then would you enter it?” The CEO, Jack Welch, used this question to do a lot of divesting and downsizing.
Nothing wrong with downsizing an old dream for a new one. Nothing wrong with a bit of focus. Children should try everything, adults not so much. If I didn’t know the shoulds, would I still do it? Would I still feel a “go?” The best dreams for me are the ones where I’m happily impelled to go home and tell someone.
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Sean Crawford
Dreaming of an alternate world,
Where we don’t have to smile when we are on the six o’clock news telling of higher food prices,
December,
2022
Note: In school, for a psychology class, a reinforcement schedule for myself didn’t work: I hadn’t chosen a good dream-goal for me: For me, silent goals are bad sign.
References:
Peter Drucker remains exciting and relevant, even today.
Business writer Peter Townsend remains unforgettable too, but he writes at level most people cannot not aspire to. His “B-list” is most people, being mostly reliable.
