morethanenoughtruth

What I must do puts me inside

a bubble of obligation.

The orb contains me, constrains me.

It intimidates me with its fixity of shape,

its featureless opacity. 

I can’t see beyond the seamless spherical capsule

that wraps my arc of thought

into a hoop of requirement,

a snake metaphorically munching its tail.

I touch the wall.  It is firm, not supple.

There is no give, no happy pop

like collapse of iridescent soap bubble

delighting eye and mind.

I can’t fly in here.

It is the sphere, not I, that defines what is real.

As I sit, my familiar weight anchoring the base

of this pure system of concept,

there is nowhere to proceed, no direction but out.

Knees to chest, heels to butt, I wait,

for what I can’t imagine. 

I twist my hair, rub my nose,

wipe my eyes, scratch my bum. 

Nothing changes.  I think about sucking my thumb,

but that’s ridiculous.

No.  This is a task for a grown up.

This is a real bubble.  It has measurable size.

It is knowable and definable.  That’s a plus.

I jiggle, bounce, rock.  The sphere reacts. 

It moves when I move and in correct proportion.

I roll back; the bubble tips back.

I lean forward; the bubble rolls away from me. 

I reach straight above my head; nothing happens.

There are rules for this engagement,

the physics of gravity a comforting familiar. 

OK!  There is something I can do even inside. 

I reach out,

place my hands against

the up-curving wall before me

and lean forward.  The ball tips.

Rising, I respond,

feet following the ball’s redefinition of base.

My hands walk up the wall to catch my falling-forward self. 

Before I realize what is happening, I’m walking. 

The ball is just the right size

for my outstretched hands

to follow its falling forward arch

that precedes me as I move. 

This is the ultimate cool.

But how do we stop? 

Of course!  I plop down and become pure weight. 

The ball stops. 

I do have a modicum of control,

even bubble-bound.

Cross-legged, manifesting the beginning point

of an infinitude of arcs of possibility, I think. 

What is it that I want?

Wanting is power.

I want to redefine this abstraction of obligation

into a joyful rite of determination.

As I breathe the air of purpose into the orb,

it grows and expands.

It creaks and shudders, and finally it shatters! 

The world outside is still there,

just like it always was,

but I am changed, charged, and challenged.

I embody meaning—purpose—action.

During my years in aerospace engineering, I routinely accepted design assignments.  The requirements were predetermined.  The specifications were what they were.  There was no opportunity to breach the barrier thwarting creative will given military as customer.  On the average it took me two or three days to relate to each task entrepreneurially.  As I sat and read the specs, mulled the possibilities, and toyed with what might be acceptable to the real world of design reviews, I was stymied by the sheer inertia of the system.  Then out of the proverbial blue, an idea would trickle into thought.  From then on the dream would create itself.  The idea had a life of its own.  I could only hang on for the ride through untold hours of nose to screen, hand to mouse, bum to chair.  Finally the grand payoff: it worked!  Of course, the final comeuppance was handing it over to manufacturing.  Those guys were short on imagination but long on doing.  Would my high-flying idea be broken on the back of actuality?  Sometimes.  Sometimes not.  Sometimes I got to see it work, hold it in my hands, feel its smooth hard metal cold in my grasp.  It was then that I loved those hard-headed, be-muscled brutes, who could bring my dream to life.  Bless them!  We do not create alone.  I owe them.  My primary obligation is to my own integrity, but after that, these induced obligations spring up on every hand like eager dandelions, weaving a lovely tapestry of trust and purpose.

I see this same process playing out even in retirement.  At church I was given the task of transporting a nonagenarian Emeritus Professor of Geographical Science, to Sunday services.  There I was, in the bubble again.  I refused to just drudge-like alter my route so as to shift physical location of the frail body and cane from his front steps to the church building and back, once in every seven days passing.  Such plodding routine is soul numbing.  I mulled the situation for several days, pondered the dreary possibility of being harnessed to that quotidian task, trips taken out of requirement, of obligation, of organizational expectation.  It is death to merely embody others’ expectations.  Energy is generated by defining our own expectation, visioning our own expedition, becoming our own true North, and—heading out! 

Then suddenly it occurred to me that I might really like to know the old man.  He undoubtedly had and still has a life.  He wasn’t always a stooped and limping codger.  Then there were the inevitable “what if’s.”  What if he didn’t want to be known?  What if we couldn’t think of anything to say?  What if he were actually losing it, as younger people tend so readily to aver?  What if I were actually losing it, dashing off on some wild-assed adventure of “love thy neighbor?”  What would people say?  But then, what do I care what people say?  What people will say foments a cumulonimbus cloud, a complex aggregation of permutations and combinations over which I have no control.  Listening to that play in my head will only steal my happiness and shove it retching and reverberating down a rat hole.  What’s needed is to call up and harness will.  A plan of action is always a recipe for generating energy, so yesterday I “vvvroooomed” over to his house, banged “shave and a hair-cut six bits” on his door, and hollered, “Would you like to go for a ride?”  He grabbed his hat, snagged his cane, and we were off in a cloud of geezer dust. 

We spent the afternoon in animated discourse, hatching plans to make sure he gets involved in church doings on a meaningful, not perfunctory, basis.  He would love to present a forum on the fascinating world of Geography as it affects absolutely everything, and to share his fascinating collection of English words appropriated from the Arabic.  Then I whipped up my signature miso soup, augmented with garden greens, shiitake mushrooms, wakame, tofu, and Basmati rice.  Dessert was monster strawberries on the stem.  It was a small delight to watch him bite into their flesh, drawing life from each berry, appropriating their Force as his own.  What more eloquent metaphor for, even at ninety, still being alive in the world?  The payoff for me is that on Sunday mornings I am not encapsulated by an obligation; I am anticipating another getting-to-know-you wild ride to church with my neighbor strapped in riding shotgun.  He is creaky, sometimes crochety, but alive and lively, and I am determined to help him stay that way.

Applying this concept to the knotty problem of church stewardship, I despise those little envelopes that slither into my mailbox, right into the sacred refuge of my domicile, reminding me of my Obligation.  Judaism makes “servicing” the wife on the eve of Shabbat into a sacred duty.  Only religion could so nimbly change a garden of earthly delights into a grinding requirement.  No wonder there’s money to be made selling Viagra.  Such interchanges spiral out, demonstrating how obligation weaves throughout a connected culture.  If we are to be part of humanity, obligation is the substrate.  We may resent it and delight in ways to circumvent it, but it is real.  Take marriage, for instance, the most basic of contentious commitments.  In an ideal world, no one would marry.  I would awake snug in a warm bed, sheets tangled and moist from last night’s passion, and ask myself, “Do I want to be with this man yet another night?  I would reply, “Of course!  I love him, and he loves me.”  But life is not perfect.  It’s complicated.  On mornings when I awake with resentment for what he did yesterday and just might do the day after tomorrow, I ask myself, “Do I want to be with this man—next year?”  Marriage serves up the requisite obligation.  It is the reliable substrate supporting things when they aren’t perfect, until another morning dawns bright with the assurance of things too wonderful to throw away in a fit of pique.  Like good arguments and shiny coins, this one has two sides.  With this insight and certainty, I programmed my bank account to send a check to my church every month no matter what.  Obligation is annoying but it just might be a dear and necessary evil.