Everyday Matters

[Photo of a giant Archimedes screw. Funny, isn’t it — how
a giant screw can be both a problem and a solution?]

From whiskey river:

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

(by Eleanor Lerman)

And, not from whiskey river, this:

[Discussing the mind traps that keep you from maintaining your motorcycle properly.]

The first is stuckness, a mental stuckness that accompanies the physical stuckness of whatever it is you’re working on… A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is “Remove side cover plate” in that wonderful terse technical style that never tells you what you want to know. There’s no earlier procedure left undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.

If you’re experienced you’d probably apply a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. But suppose you’re inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you’ve had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.

Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn’t just irritating and minor. You’re stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It’s absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.

…

This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.

It’s normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you’re inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It’s just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

What you’re up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought… Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination…”unstuckness,” in other words… are completely outside its domain.

…

Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now… you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out.

(Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

Finally, Robbie Robertson and The Band provide their own every-night solution to everyday matters (lyrics below):

Lyrics:

All La Glory
(music and lyrics by J.R. Robertson;
performance by The Band;
vocal by Levon Helm)

I wanna hear pitter patter
Climb up your ladder now
It’s time for you to dream away,
For what a big day you’ve been through.
You’ve done all the things that you wanted to do.
All la glory, I’m second story,
Feel so tall like a prison wall.

I’m lookin’ for a star bright
To shine down your light now
And keep the little one safe and warm,
‘Cause to her it’s just a fantasy
And to me it’s all a mystery.
All la glory, I’m second story,
Feel so tall like a prison wall.

And before the leaves all turn brown,
Before they fall to the ground,
You will find the harmony,
Wait and see.

Listen to the serenade,
Little girl, promenade now.
You’ve got the sunshine in your hand
And maybe come some sweet day
You’ll walk that Milky Way.
All la glory, I’m second story,
Feel so tall like a prison wall,

That tall.