Going to the Jones’s home for a crab‑feast is a blast from my own red‑neck childhood. Several friends are wearing boardwalk T‑shirts with cartoon characters that hawk hot cars, hot women, and hot places to party.
Their living room is decorated with beer memorabilia. The best one is a can of Bud Light, imprisoned like a model sailing ship in a glass bottle, mounted on a plaque that says “Break in Case of Emergency.”
Fun folks.
I'm told they're about to get a divorce.
What's going on with many Americans' Weekend? I think it’s something like this. They don’t want to disappear, be anonymous. “Underneath this hard‑working exterior,” they seem to say, “is an eagle, a free‑spirit, a little bit crazy, unpredictable, able at any moment to bust out of the confines. Look out! I can get pretty wild!”
I wonder how many of the people I pass in the mall feel trapped, hungry for some kind of transcendence, angry that they may be overlooked, mad that they’ve been treated like a cog in a machine.
It saddens me to suspect that few will find transcendence; most will return from their cruises tired and disappointed. Their friends will be bored by their photographs. The customized car or high-powered boat will not provide the expansion they're looking for. The drunken spree will only make the “real world” feel more strangulating. It is an inner self they long for, and they do not have the tools to reach it.
Wildness is a groping toward transcendence. Maybe you’ve overcome it, and see it only in the people you try to help. But if I get bitten once in a while by the reckless bug, such a meditation as this one may remind me how to scratch this intriguing itch, maybe eliminate the bug.
Tame the unruly horse of your mind.
Basho
The Sound of Water
Be still and know that I am God.
Psalm 46:11
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
Walden and Civil Disobedience
