This Month's Story

First of all I want to state very definitely that I am not superstitious or that I in any way agree that there are mysterious, at times good, at times malevolent, forces that we must constantly placate to exist.

I feel that worrying about things such as assembling my thoughts or my physical living space to be in harmony with feng shui is not something I want to do. This goes as well for the theory that Leos and Aries should never hold hands, that I should stay in bed on Friday the thirteenth, or that I should always walk in the street to avoid cracks in the sidewalk.

Those supposed absolutes may well mean something in governing the universe, but I don’t care. Or at least I think I don’t care. To be truthful, now that I have experienced a few things in life, I’m not quite as sure as I once was.

Let me explain. In my younger years the world was a simple place. I felt strongly that the saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” was gospel, something handed down from the Mount with the other tablet. I was positive that when things started to go bad, that if I would just try a little harder...

Let me go a little further on this.

Remember the old television show “Mission Impossible?” At one time I fully believed that when the team’s technician hung in an elevator shaft from a rope and opened a fuse box the exact fuse he was looking for would be there.

I believed that it was indeed possible for him hanging from the rope to reach inside and disconnect that exact fuse from amid the dozen or so inside. As a result somewhere a critical–to–the–show’s– plot electrical apparatus would turn off. Wham! And from this simple ‘Wham’, his cohorts would be able to routinely foil the intentions of that night’s evil doers.

Did you believe that?

I did. It all seemed to me in those halcyon days to be very, very possible. Not halting the evil doers, not that. That was a given. No, I mean his finding when he opened that dirty, rusty, ill–used fuse box door, the correct fuse.

The thought that some sub–contractor may have omitted the entire fuse box as an economy step during the elevator’s installation was absolutely alien to my thought. And so it went.

Remember I was very young.

In my naiveté, I walked in a world that I thought was granite. A world where things that were to be so, were so. And they were more than that. They were absolutely so.

It was a world in which 2 plus 2 always equaled 4. A world controlled solely by logic, and deviations from a logical universe were not just impractical, but impossible for me to conceive. When I reached out and touched things, they were there, they were real.

It was a wonderful time to live.

However, I’m starting to feel that there are trends to things that for me to ignore are equally foolish. I began to feel that Qi actually existed. That maybe a bit of feng shui might help.

My disillusion has been gradual.

There had been a slight tearing in the fabric of my basic beliefs as I made my way through the real world. I tried to hold on but I found myself constantly making emergency repairs and finding that my repairs were really just patchwork.

To be blunt, this has been very hard on me. No matter how much I have tried to resist, the tearing of the basic tenets of my life has continued.

I once was the head scientist of an ocean experiment in the Gulf of Cortez. It was a complex experiment in that it had many components and people. But in theory, its overall goal was simple, and I assumed if I took care of the details and arranged for sufficient backups, nothing could go wrong. And so I planned every iota of every detail.

Nothing could go wrong, I thought, nothing.

Well, things did go wrong. They went very bad from the start and then got worse, much worse. If a unit went down, its backup went down and then so did the backup to the backup.

On the day when the last call came in telling me that another segment of the experiment was in complete shambles, the Mexican government’s liaison with my experiment, an army colonel, invited me to join him for lunch at a local cantina. There was nothing more I could do, so I went with him.

Once seated at a table of very good food, the sun shining on a beautiful day, he raised his glass.

“I don’t know about you, Paul, but I have lost bigger wars than this! We are friends here and this is good food and this is a beautiful day. That’s what counts.

“Salud!”

I joined him in the toast. Our lunch that day was delicious, and we spent the next several hours enjoying it and the day.

In the end we parted, and I went back to my hotel to prepare for my departure the next day. I was surprised how, because of the lunch, my attitude had changed. I knew I had done my best, but things had gone bad anyway.

I slept on the plane ride home the next day.

I slept with the firm knowledge that there would be other wars and in each I would do my best and afterward I would be able to sit down with a friend, eat a good meal and enjoy the day.