CSotD: Carrying a trayful of large, white bears
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Pardon My Planet and Willie 'n Ethel score a particularly pleasing double today by over-thinking pop psych cliches.
Of course, you're not supposed to overthink these things. It's like carrying a tray of soup: If you look, you spill.
The rub being that the person who isn't going to look at the soup doesn't need the advice, and telling someone that the trick is not to look at the soup is probably going to make them look at the soup to see if not looking at the soup is working.
It's like the club that Tolstoy and his brother made up as kids, in which the initiation was to stand in the corner for an hour without thinking of a large white bear.
"Today is the first day of the rest of your life" is the better of the two, by far. I first came across it in Abbie Hoffman's "Revolution for the Hell of It," but it's older than that.
Wikipedia traces it to Synanon founder Chuck Dedrich, which would place it in the substance-dependency-treatment world, which seems about right.
As well as in the creepy over-the-top cult world, which ditto.
It's good advice for someone who is going through a particular crisis, but the emphasis there is "going through," as opposed to "wallowing in," because, if they are wallowing, it's not a crisis. It's a lifestyle.
Which is how a treatment program turns into a cult, I guess, because people for whom the immediate problem is not the actual problem are simply going to find something else to latch dependently onto. And even an unintentional guru can find himself with Oack, Pack, Mack and the rest of the ducklings trailing behind him as he walks down the street.
Perhaps the saying should be "Today is the first day of the rest of your life, but I don't mean the rest of your life should be spent sitting in a circle of folding chairs telling other people how you aren't going to keep doing self-destructive things anymore. I mean the day you get up and walk the hell out of here is the first day of the rest of your life. Actually, what I mean is that the first day of the rest of your life is the day you manage to get through the whole day without thinking about a large, white bear."
And that's gonna take a long bumpersticker.
"Live each day as if it were your last" is sort of the opposite, in that it assumes you are more or less on the right track, just a little overcautious or maybe even lazy. It's a cousin of "Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today," but that's so steeped in Puritan work ethic that it can't transmit the positive vibe of the similar "Make hay while the sun shines."
And yet making hay is a great deal of work, too.
Robert Herrick may have put the most playful spin on it:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
Note that Herrick was addressing himself "To the Virgins," who shouldn't need to be reminded that an awful lot of gratuitous advice is offered with ulterior motives.
But then they shouldn't need to be reminded not to look at the soup, either, and I'm not selling my shares in the Acme Mop Company.
To put a serious face on it, when my dad had his first heart attack, he very, very nearly bought the farm, and, in the couple of years before the second-and-final one, he was quite conscious of the need not to put things off.
That included a lot of telling people he appreciated them and being more demonstrative with family and close friends, but it also included assembling a guide book for my mother of everything from how he had been handling their financial dealings to who to call if the furnace fails. Yes, he was an engineer. How did you guess?
On the other hand, one of the few things he remembered from the chaos of the first attack was the hospital chaplain asking him if he felt prepared to die.
And he said that, if you asked him that question at some other time, he'd have had a laundry list of things to worry about. But when the question came as he was actually staring into the void, he was surprised and relieved to realize how little any of that stuff mattered.
Which is a lot more comforting to me than all the pop culture cliches in the world, but, then again, you'll note that, when he finally walked out of the hospital a month(!) later, he addressed all those issues and made sure the decks were clear for his next trip to the brink.
I started out by saying that you shouldn't overthink these things and then promptly did just that, turning an admonition not to deprive yourself of a hot fudge sundae if you want one into a reflection on the Apocalypse, so let's return to the general topic of wisdom.
For that, I will go not to my father but to his, a very wise man to whom we often turned for advice. And my grandfather would listen carefully and offer his thoughts, but always with the clear understanding that we didn't have to do what he recommended, since we were almost certainly going to go ahead and do whateverthehell we had planned to do in the first place anyway and were most likely just looking for someone to tell us we were right.
Wise man, my grandfather.
Here singeth one:
the song of mehitabel
this is the song of mehitabel
of mehitabel the alley cat
as i wrote you before boss
mehitabel is a believer
in the pythagorean
theory of the transmigration
of the soul and she claims
that formerly her spirit
was incarnated in the body
of cleopatra
that was a long time ago
and one must not be
surprised if mehitabel
has forgotten some of her
more regal manners
i have my ups and downs
but wotthehell wotthehell
yesterday sceptres and crowns
fried oysters and velvet gowns
and today i herd with bums
but wotthehell wotthehell
i wake the world from sleep
as i caper and sing and leap
when i sing my wild free tune
wotthehell wotthehell
under the blear eyed moon
i am pelted with cast off shoon
but wotthehell wotthehell
do you think that i would change
my present freedom to range
for a castle or a moated grange
wotthehell wotthehell
cage me and i d go frantic
my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai
i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai
I once was an innocent kit
wotthehell wotthehell
with a ribbon my neck to fit
and bells tied onto it
o wotthehell wotthehell
but a maltese cat came by
with a come hither look in his eye
and a song that soared to the sky
and wotthehell wotthehell
and i followed adown the street
the pad of his rhythmical feet
o permit me again to repeat
wotthehell wotthehell
my youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret
wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai
the things that i had not ought to
i do because i ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai
boss sometimes i think
that our friend mehitabel
is a trifle too gay
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