Rick's Bench

Rick owns forty acres of wilderness located about fifty miles north of nowhere.  Rick's wife is my wife's best friend, and we were invited to spend a few days with them in the home they rented for their summer vacation on the shore of Lake Superior.

The girls went off to art galleries and such one morning, and Rick took me to his land.  I hadn't been there before.  He bought his forty from the elderly grandson of an original settler some 25 years ago. It's hunting land.  There isn't a cabin or electricity, or even a driveway.  He just drives up a neighbor's drive, then onto his land as far as he can go until the land becomes swampy.

Then it's a long hike through thickets, poplar stands, oak and maple, and huge conifers.  If you don't know the land, you'd be lost in one turn.  Rick has been hunting and fishing here as long as he has owned the land.  He knows it very well.  I just followed him, and we both stopped every few minutes to pick the ticks off of our clothes and bodies.

Years ago Rick dragged some slab lumber, nails, a hammer and a saw to a high point on the land and built a bench.  It rests in a small clearing above the Iron River

I sat on the bench for an hour while Rick walked the stream, casting for trout.  Silence.  The only sounds were the sound of the river cascading over small rocks, and a few birds.  Silence, blessed silence.

I sat for an hour, clearing mind and heart.  I can't describe what happened in that hour because I'm not sure I understand it, but I know this: I was a different person at the end of the hour than I was at the start.  And the change is still with me.

More beneath the fold.

Acceptance

How old were you when you calmed down?  Or maybe you haven’t calmed down yet.  No worries; it’ll come along soon enough.

It’s an odd question, isn’t it, my asking you when you calmed down.  I mean it in the best sense, just asking your age when you came to realize that you can’t change everything.  And perhaps in some way accepting that you can’t change anything or anyone other than yourself.

When did you finally realize that it was time to stop pushing as hard as you could against doors that were clearly marked “Pull to Open”?  And then when you finally gave those doors a pull and they opened easily and you said “Ahhh….I should have known this years ago!”  When was that?

Acceptance of one’s imperfections, of one’s fallibilities, of one’s inability to control the world is the entry point to adulthood.  Not the adulthood of being age 21, or even age 31 or age 41, I suppose.  Not the adulthood marked by boxes and pages on a calendar, but the adulthood of accepting one’s mortality and smallness.  Not smallness in the sense of bad behavior and pettiness, but smallness in the universe.  The smallness that causes you to do good things for those you care about rather than trying to save the world; and a faith that if everyone does small, good things the maybe the world will be better.

It happened to me the first time when I was in my late 40s.  In a flash I knew that I didn’t want to continue living on airplanes, chasing one business meeting after another at the cost of being apart from my family.  I quit that day.

And it happens again every year after Christmas Day and before New Year’s Day.  I resolve that I am not in control, and I accept that.  I can’t fix every problem, but I can listen when loved ones share theirs.  I can’t change the world, but I can change myself.  I don’t need to be in the social register, or to go to the right parties with the right people.  I don’t need to have the big house, the new cars, or the showy aspirational things.

Accepting that one can’t have everything is the first step on the path to having the things that truly matter.