Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I have been running on the Farmington Canal trail through Hamden a lot recently. Isabel has gymnastics class several times a week and the trail is a short drive from her gym. This gives me two or three excellent opportunities in the midst of an often-busy workweek to get out and run four or five miles without feeling like I should be somewhere else, doing something else.

Since the New Year, I have seen the same hawk, perched in the same tree, each time I have run the trail. The time of day is always the same, the tree is always the same, and the bird is always the same. I am not really sure how I even saw it the first time. It sits so still and its mottled feathers match the bark of the trunk it tucks up against so perfectly that it is sometimes hard to spot, even though I now know exactly where to look.

I have gotten to the point that I now stop and say hi to the bird. (My daughter thinks this is slightly crazy.)

Each time I have run the trail these past three weeks, it has been cold and often it has been snowy. There have been very few other humans out there in that oddly beautiful little valley running through some fairly developed neighborhoods near some heavily trafficked roads. I have had a lot of time and space and quiet to let my mind wander the way it will during a good run.

Where my mind has wandered lately is to the idea of “change.” New Year’s resolutions are all about making changes. Barack Obama ran hard on the notion of making necessary changes. My wife and I have been contemplating what sorts of changes to make in our lives.

Yet, the status quo has such power and things can feel so frozen.

As I run through that valley and hear the stream gurgling through the snow-covered rocks, it feels like winter will not end. Actually, that doesn’t quite explain the feeling. Rather than winter not ever ending, it feels as if the changes the Earth and Sun need to go through to make winter turn to spring will never happen. It is not a feeling of hopelessness, but rather one of powerlessness. Spring absolutely WILL happen. There is just nothing I can do to make it happen any sooner. And as a result, winter feels like the permanent state of affairs.

A few days ago I thought about getting the hawk’s opinion on this idea but when I stopped to try, one look at him told me he would not understand. One look at him told me that he is patience personified, (or should I say “avified?) That hawk would not want to make spring come any sooner. That hawk is waiting. It is what he does. He waits. Spring comes.

What Do You Worry About?

I got to thinking about worrying last night at one in the morning as I was leaving The Playwright in Hamden. I had spent a few hours watching Villanova upset Clemson and now I just wanted to get home and go to sleep. As I left the bar I reached into my pocket and took out the key to our Ford Windstar. And then I immediately put the key safely back in my pocket as I walked to the van.

Believe it or not, that key is probably the object I worry about most in my life. I have never assigned actual percentages to the things I worry about, but if I were to make a list and then divvy it up proportionally, I have a strong suspicion that key would top the list. It might even come out with a 20 or 25 percent share of all the object-related anxiety (ORA) in my life.

Some of the other objects on that list would include the roof of our house, my wallet, my shoelaces, my fake front tooth, my laptop, the wine glasses on our somewhat-tippy wine cabinet, my wife’s bank card, my wife’s sunglasses, my wife’s cell phone, our basement floor, our water heater, our furnace, and the dogfood bin on the floor of the kitchen.

Don’t get me wrong…I don’t spend huge amounts of time or energy worrying about objects in my life. It’s not like I have an ORA fixation or anything. Worrying is mostly a waste of time. To the extent that it makes you consider the possibility of things going wrong and then prods you to take measures to make it more likely that things will go right, then worrying can be said to be productive. But anything beyond that is really just a misappropriation of scarce mental resources.

But in the case of the key to our Ford, the amount of worrying I do feels entirely justified. You see, since we have owned the vehicle, we have had only one key for it. It is some special sort of key that can’t be duplicated at a standard hardware store. The dealer tells us that in order to get another key made, we will need to leave him the van for up to a week while they make one specially for us. It has been three years and, in spite of the potential hardships that would be brought on by the loss of that one stinkin’ key, we have not yet bitten the bullet and paid the $100.00 a new key would require of us.

Until we do, I always make sure to leave the key in my pocket until I am actually standing at the driver’s door. I can all-too-easily imagine the key falling from my hand and plummeting irretrievably down a sewer grate. Realizing how much of my actual worry-time was spent on that key made me wonder what other people worry about. I know we all have the standard stuff—job, family, spouse, economy, war and peace, etc—but in some ways these seem LESS interesting to me than the quirky and unusual tangible items we spend energy worrying about.

I don’t know how to do it, but someone should create a website where people can post lists of the things they worry about. I know I would check in there every once in a while just to see how crazy we all are.