Forests, Trees, & Resolutions

A Note from DW:

Just a request here. I recently started this blog, and since I don’t (and won’t) have any social media accounts, or know any hight-falutin’ influencers who might promote my stuff to others, the subscription base is pretty small.

If you feel like it, I would appreciate it any of you with social-media accounts (Twitter/Facebook/Instagram, etc) would repost it on yours, and encourage your friends/relatives/contacts to hit the “subscribe” button (it’s free).

It’s a lot more fun for me to write when I know more than a handful of people are reading.

I’m also posting a “share” button to make it easier.

Thanks

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While my local tailor may perform alterations only on Monday and Wednesday between 3–5 p.m., the rest of humanity is not bound by the sacred canons of the clothier’s union. As individuals we should not feel compelled to believe that an amendment to one’s personal charter is an all or nothing proposition. We are nearing that time of year when it is common to articulate resolutions both large and small, but why is such a custom reserved for a single day? Each sunrise presents the perfect climate to make a change.

Come New Year’s Day, an infinite number of folks will vow to start anew. They will make their declarations and engage in the turning of new leaves. These are fine testaments to the power of free will and introspection, but there seems an inherent flaw in the process. It is not necessary to return to step one, to dispense with all the knowledge that has come before. Our sole mandate is to look around, identify your locale and place one foot in front of the other. After all, it is the joys, smiles, scars, and aches of the past which lead us to better shape and appreciate what is yet to be.

Discretion may well be the better part of valor, but the better part of wisdom resides in strategic concession. The key to a long and happy life often involves knowing when to give a bit of ground, to reconsider, to carefully plumb the depths of common sense. It is the sagacious individual who understands that, for the most harmonious outcome, our endeavors should dispense with the abstractions of beginning and end. Concepts such as ego, victory, and defeat are but parts of the whole that distract the mind from the task at hand. The two latter notions are transient at best. Excessive ego is a stumbling block whose price reflects poor value, the crutch of politicians, celebrities, talk-show hosts, and tele-evangelists.

I was thinking about these things while lying flat on the ground, my back in spasms and seed ticks munching my torso. Well, that’s not exactly true; while sprawled face-down in the weeds my primary concern revolved around whether or not my legs still worked. The deeper thought process didn’t begin until I crab-walked to the house and became reacquainted with my old friends Mr. Heat Pad and Mr. Advil.

I surmised that, when jousting at windmills, the windmill usually wins. It was time to surrender the particular chunk of territory that compelled me to try and lift logs which weighed more than I did. It was time to admit that denial is far more than a river in Egypt, that fighting age is a war of attrition against a tenacious adversary with an unblemished record. It didn’t matter that, during my Montana years, I spent a part of each day swinging a 20-pound wood maul and could lift and tote logs with nary a twinge. What mattered was that - if I didn’t alter my behavior - I could expect many more weeks constricted by that lovely fashion accessory known as a lumbar belt.

Thus, I installed a furnace in my house. A real one. One that works on electricity. I can still have my wood stove. I can still fell and saw a few trees, swing the big hammer, and enjoy the warmth and the orange flicker. I just don’t have to be obsessive or obstinate about it.

Out with the old, in with the new? Not really. More like appreciating the old and accepting the new with grace and enthusiasm. It’s not about starting over, or cursing the compulsory. It’s about understanding the importance of experience, utilizing the trials of then and the tests of now to meet the future with a dollop of perspicacity.

It is good to look before you leap, to rest before you resolve. But, further contemplation is required when the urge strikes to wholly uproot the weathered oak and replace it with a sapling. Far better to trim and prune, to make the best of, and perhaps make better, what you already have.

Thanks to the enlightening effects of a bad back, I’ve handed down a commutation of sentence on quite a few of my weathered oaks. I’m content with a small, happy blaze. I’m at peace with the realization that many struggles are of our own design.

I’m pleased with the new furnace, warmed by the recognition that, with simple assent to the inevitable, the trials of time fade like whispers on the wind.