It doesn’t require any effort to picture dad looking at my ear and asking me if I want to be Van Gogh.
“Dad, I am good at writing and pretty good at telling a story verbally when I want to. Painting or drawing are not my thing.
Cut the damn thing while I was shaving my head.”
“That was silly. Why’d you do that.”
I can see the smile on his face and hear it in his voice, but he isn’t here. So I won’t get the follow up where he offers me 10,000 razors and creams he tried but doesn’t like.
Nor will I get the advice on how to shave my head based upon his experience, so I’ll look up at the sky and smile.
“I don’t think I’ll do this with any sort of regularity dad. I was irritated about a bunch of things and was looking for a brief project that required me to focus. Guess I should have done a better job.”
Put in another four miles today and watched three daughters glare with their mother at their father, can’t say why.
All I heard was him growl “Goddammit Randi!”
In a way it reminded me of having all three of my sisters yell at me and how the oldest would threaten to call our parents to tell them I was being awful.
Maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t, I don’t remember.
But I do remember how I knew how to unplug the phone and they didn’t. You can call that one of the benefits of being the kid who helped dad run phone lines under the house so we could install a few more jacks.
And now a thousand years later I live without a landline and have done so for so long I’d have to think extra hard to remember the last time I had one.
****
Neil deGrasse Tyson is teaching a masterclass on how to think and I have played around with signing up for it.
I’d prefer to do it in person but in theory there is merit to watching videos of a course that has an outline and structure. Have to do some more research upon it all before I would be willing to commit the time.
Had a conversation with someone about fear and used the Emerson quote above. It is not an absolute rule of mine, there are limits upon it.
But that doesn’t stop me from trying to live it or from sharing that it has served me very well on more than one occasion.
I won’t say I came up with it on my own nor tell you if one person pushed me to follow said advice because I don’t remember.
What I am certain is that I have benefited from it and that I have used it as proof that sometimes I do listen to advice.
Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to live in a lighthouse.
Sometimes I think about posting a picture with an empty hand and a caption saying “Here I Am.”
Sometimes I think about what music I would choose to tell me story and how many songs I would or wouldn’t use.
Would I want a 100, a 1000 or try to limit to just five. Don’t know for certain, I just dance in the fire, listen for the bells and try to not get into trouble…daily.
🙂
