Spring Cleaning on the YBR. If not now, when?

It’s the first day of spring. Again. After what to me was an endless winter (Shakespeare’s Gloucester called it the winter of our discontent in his Richard III), I welcome spring with open arms. And while that’s good, it would be better still if I welcomed spring with an open mind. That, I believe, is a Herculean task, because the entire world (in my opinion) has been struggling through a very long winter of discontent. Anger, hatred, and disillusionment compounded by what feels like a century of the consequences of the pandemic, have rendered so many of us spirit-wounded.

We the people have been engaged in a tug-of-war that is fueled by political pundits that pound us on the head with their very one-sided arguments. It doesn’t matter what “news” shows you watch on television, listen to on the radio or follow on the internet we have all been trapped in a corner that gets smaller and smaller.

When once-upon-a-time I could call myself open-minded, I no longer believe I have the right to do so. Not that I have become close-minded. I’ve just become numb-minded.

I no longer trust anything I hear because it’s all so one-sided, so black-and-white, and so partisan. I don’t believe issues have only two sides. It’s not matter of heads or tails. It’s not I’m right and you’re wrong.

I can no longer embrace the idea that there is only one truth, especially since “all truths” are not so self-evident. “Our” penchant for affirming that what we “believe” is the truth and the only truth is the root (in my opinion) for the hatred that courses through our veins and poisons our brains.

Dorothy and her traveling companions (Toto, too) were not searching for a truth. Dorothy wanted to go home, the Scarecrow wanted a brain, the Tin Man a heart, and the Lion sought courage. (We never learned what Toto wanted.)

We the people are seeking what the characters on the Yellow Brick Road were hoping to find. And in the end they did find it, but not in the court of Oz in the Emerald City. They found it by seeking it. It was in the journey that they found what they were looking for. And we all know that they already had what they were looking for. They just didn’t know it.

I fear that not only are people no longer following the yellow brick road, they have lost the gifts they were born with: reason, love and courage and a place they call “home.”

We are unreasonable creatures, and by that I mean we no longer know how to use our gift of “reason.” We see a coin as having only two sides. In reality all coins have a third “side.”

I am of a mind to “think” we choose a side before we examine that which seems to separate the two sides. I am well-aware that my “notion” is anathema to the majority of people in the world because so many people believe there is only one “right” side to every argument/belief. We no longer know how to see both sides of an argument. What’s worse, we will go to all lengths to “prove” our side is right despite valid arguments to the contrary.

This spring we need to open the windows of our minds and let in the fresh air of reasoned thinking. I also believe spring is a great time to unclutter the basement where so much hatred has cluttered our souls.

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It’s about time.

It happens to me each year around this time when we set our clocks ahead an hour.  It is a painful reminder to me of how futile is our attempt to control time.  Only a blink of an eye ago on the verge of spring I was a 10 year-old boy throwing a baseball around in a vacant lot, flying a kite, and riding my bike (hands-free) around the neighborhood.  When I was 10 and spring was in the air I looked forward to Easter and couldn’t wait for the school-year to end. When I was 10, there were 38 wonderful hours in a day, or so it seemed.  Today, I hate the idea of losing an hour’s sleep.

 It’s all about time. Or so it seems.  Time is a commodity more precious than anything money can buy.  We try to manage it, but it seems to manage us.  I wonder if we have lost sight of the real meaning of time.  Is the world really a better place because we have DVR’s. snapchat, tic toc, and a score of devices that hood us prisoner in a cyber world?

We all seem to be in such a hurry.  But where are we going?  My second year Latin teacher, Sr. Clare taught me something about hurrying.  She had two Latin words written on the blackboard:  Festina Lente (Hurry Slowly). And while it sounds like an oxymoron, those words seem to have more meaning today than they did two thousand years ago.

We do everything quickly.  Instead of savoring each moment, we’re like the kid on Christmas morning that tears the wrapping paper off present-after-present without ever taking the time to revel at the gift inside. 

Over a century ago the American poet Henry Van Dyke wrote, “time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is not.”

It’s all about time.  We never seem to have enough of it, but, as H. Jackson Brown pointed out, “we have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo DaVinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein.”

I believe we need to take the time to make the time.  We need to consider how we spend the precious time we are given because “time is the most valuable thing a man can spend (Diogenes).”  I look back not on the money I might have foolishly wasted in my life, but the fool I was to waste so much of my time worrying about inconsequential matters.  I look around me as the world is coming back to life and I see what matters most in life is not money, power or fame, but enjoying the moment and depositing it, not in a FDIC bank, but in our memory bank where we can visit it anytime we wish without fear of it being diminished over time.

At this time of year I’m young again. When I close my eyes, I can see the tree house my friends and I built in the vacant lot across from my house, the cowboy wallpaper on my bedroom walls, the red bike I called ‘the Crusader,’ the dented basketball hoop nailed to the telephone pole outside, and the old house down the end of the block that I swore was haunted. 

When I take a deep breath I can smell my father’s Old Spice aftershave and my mother’s Toll House cookies.  I can smell the dreams upon my pillow, the fragrance of which makes my heart race and my soul yearn for the way it used to be.  I inhale the aroma of days gone by and hold my breath until my face turns blue.

When I sit very still the world of memory comes alive with the sounds of my childhood.  I can hear the dreams rustling in my head.  I hear the refrains of Davey Crocket and Howdy Doody.  I hear the shrill voice of a teacher who used to scare the bejebies out of me.  And if I listen real close, I can still hear my grandmother’s voice as she bounces me on her knee and sings, “Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross to see an old lady upon a white horse.  She’ll have rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and she will have music wherever she goes.” I wonder where my memories will go when I’m no longer of this earth.  Will they die with me and get buried in the ground? 

I don’t have the answer.  All I know is that I count my blessings and continue to marvel at the amazing gift of life and I am warmed by the fire of the cherished memories I have stored away in the recesses of my mind.  Festina lente.

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