I changed the configuration of my study yesterday. The transformation, relatively minor, reminded me there is only so much I can do with my “retreat” space. Oh, I could do more if I had an unlimited budget and access to talented architects and skilled craftsmen, but I have neither. I did what I could do with no money, severely limited skills and abilities, and impatience driven by reality. If time and resources did not constrain me, I might have added a few hundred square feet of floor space, floor-to-ceiling windows (with views of the Chicago skyline on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other), and an endless array of luxuries…like an espresso maker connected to a water line, a full-time massage therapist, and a grand piano (plus the ability to play it flawlessly). Impractical does not begin to describe my wishes. In my heart-of-hearts, I am a fantasist. Instead of all those unfulfilled wishes, though, my reconfiguration amounted to this: I turned the desk by 90°, moved my computer and a small table, and shredded or otherwise discarded a considerable amount 0f paper that had hidden my desktop.
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For what purpose, I have to ask myself, did I want to rearrange my study? No special reason, I have to admit. Just change. A different view. An attempt to distract myself from a somewhat depressing reality. What the effort did, instead, was to focus my attention more keenly on how little control we have over the world and our place in it. I learned nothing new, of course; I just refreshed my perspective. Each of us experiences an incredibly short span of time in which we have consciousness. We have no way to compare the vast stretches of time before we became conscious and after that consciousness ceases to exist. We existed before we knew we existed. And we know we will exist in some form after our conscious existence ends, but we know little else. Perhaps it is impossible to know anything beyond what we already know about the before and after periods. Maybe that’s why we spend so little of our conscious time contemplating what was and what will be? Perhaps we should not even be asking questions for which there are no answers. Instead, maybe we should devote our energies to seeking questions that CAN be answered. Yet what good would that do us? We may or may not ever know. Billions of people have come and gone before us; probably asking the same questions and cursing our curiosity when we realize the answers have never been f0rmulated.
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My pain does not adhere to a scale devised by people who feel and think only in small whole numbers. My pain can be legitimately compared to the discomfort that causes a giraffe with a broken ankle to grimace…or to the anguish an antelope feels as a lion’s claws rips through its flesh. In the first case, “4” on a scale of 0 to 10 might be a gross exaggeration. But a “10” would be entirely insufficient to describe the level of an antelope’s agony in the second. A physical state that causes pain many times worse than unanesthetized vivisection can be described only by using exponents of no less than 10 to the power of 99 (1099). So why is it that nurses insist on patients limiting their pain levels to a wholly inadequate scale? I feel guilty of whining if I assign a “7” to the pain in my gut, because I try to compare that pain to how it might feel to be torn to pieces by the blades of a rusted chain saw. My gut may hurt mightily, but is it only 3 whole numbers less than the unimaginable agony of having one’s limbs sliced off with poorly-maintained tree-trimming equipment?
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