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Just Dive In, They Say

[3-minute read]

I don’t want to just dive in to water, and I don’t care if I’m the “last one in…[and] a rotten egg!”. Bodies of water larger than a bathtub are not my best friends, and besides, I don’t just dive in to nearly anything.

Which is strange, because I love beginnings, the freshness of unstained hope not yet wracked by reality.¹ I think “diving in” reminds me of a future that I deny. Go jump in the lake can mean, in the wrong mind, I hope you die soon. Some of my resistance to jumping into water I can’t see the bottom of, I begin to glumly theorize, arises from my diffidence about death. It doesn’t feel like dread, not quite, but I do sense my unpreparedness. Strange waters or familiar, they feel like a presentiment of extinction. This explains a lot of things.

¹ I wish this applied to writing, though. The terror of the start, the Thing Not Yet Begun, still is not and maybe never will be quite overcome by the eventual flow of production and the relieved delight of having written. I often say, “Reading (or writing, and probably ‘rithmatic for that matter!) is like running; you have to build your stamina and skill to make it a positive habit.” I guess swimming is like writing, too, except that I don’t imagine ever being competent in water and, whatever my writing resistances are, I don’t dread imminent death when I scribble.

Some of this nervous distaste for getting in over my head, not just metaphorically but literally, is less abstract. It comes from my blasted confidence while in water, a feeling of drifting towards doom that may have begun with (and was certainly stoked by) a childhood failure at lessons in my small town’s cracked outdoor pool. It was simple stuff that the mermaids in blue one-piece bathers were asking of me, but I couldn’t do it. Ever since, a lake or pool or pond is above all a glorious thing to get out of, to put sand or clay or concrete underfoot again, to gaze from solid ground on the seductive beauty of water in motion, water still, water frozen and forever. I love looking at water. I stare at it, fascinated, confirmed to find it in front of me, not over my head.

Diving in, on my preferred footing of metaphor, is letting go of my dried-out conventions and certainties, which is hard to do. I can admit to the occasional thrill when literally doing so, in Actual Water. When hot, even if unbothered, crashing into coolness is a lively shock, and I don’t flounder right away. I just hang there, most of me under the surface. From the hindsight of a desk, I wonder why a man with more than sufficient body fat won’t float with more ease. But suspended in a cold, thought-stunning brew, I always play dead for a while,

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Shoghi Effendi (on humanity’s prospects)

When I was about 10 weeks old, the appointed Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, died unexpectedly in London, England on November 4. He was barely 60. He was brilliant, notably as a writer/historian, and could’ve been and done many

Beautiful, carefree face. He’s about 8.

things, but when his grandfather appointed him to lead the small Baha’i community, he gave up alternate futures completely, at the age of 24. He died in harness, and the Cause that he led for 37 years is still trying to account for all the work he did in establishing it on firm and growing administrative, spiritual, ethical and material foundations. Shoghi Effendi was a community architect, counsellor, pre-eminent translator of its scriptures, and an astoundingly prolific correspondent.

One of his many book-length letters was written to the Baha’is of the West in March of 1941, in the darkest days of the second World War.

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ODY: Week 6 (42/365). Old, Blue, Borrowed and New.

Just picking up Old Dog hairs from your carpet for the first time? The creation myth is here, and the first step is here.

I spent the first part of the week at a training seminar in Toronto, bunking at Sue and André’s place in a cozy Beaches neighbourhood. I’d dragged the guitar along, and kept the faith with some late-night strumming on Sunday. On Monday night, I got caught. André, husband of my wife’s old friend Sue, came home from work late and heard something that reminded him of music in his spare bedroom. He poked his head in to praise Sue for dusting off her guitar. Instead, he found me playing the ol’ Dégas in my underwear. Hurray! Male bonding!

I was training as a facilitator for the Virtues Project , an approach to teaching, child-rearing and relationships that puts fundamental human goodness right up front. Guitar Virtuosity was on my mind. Let’s examine a partial list:

Courage? (Check. Terrified of this thing, started anyway.)
Creativity? (Okay. I am making things. Basement noises. Muttering blogs.)
Enthusiasm? (Muted. Taking a jock approach: never too high, never too low. Should make more whoopee. Not what you’re thinking, though that’s not a bad idea, either.)
Determination? (Check. Day 42, kids!)
Diligence? (Long past due, but duly done.)
Humility? (If I needed more, this newfound clumsiness really helps.)
Idealism? (Larded with practicality and order, but hopefulness leaks through.)
Orderliness? (I have a good place. As for time, though, I shoe-horn practice into the absolute heel of my day, and the night-time, blues be damned, ain’t necessarily the right time…)
Patience? (Man, it doesn’t come easily, but it comes. Haven’t thrown anything. Yet.)
Self-discipline? (42 in a row argues for Yes, but the frayed edges of disappointment try to shout them down. I am disciplining Self to listen more to column A. All those days, whether purposeful or not, count. “90% of life is just showing up,” saith the prophet Woody Allen. I have showed up at fretboard and keyboard.)

Virtues I haven’t the nerve to acknowledge yet as part of this off-key odyssey:

Confidence. (A rumour, a far-away voice. So far, will and embarrassed enthusiasm rule.)
Excellence. (I have, however, just emerged from a pothole in the footpath to the parking lot next to the on-ramp to the road to excellence. That counts.)
Joyfulness. (I hear its giggle, but it runs away when I look.)
Service. (Hard to see what this does for others. Nobody-but-me for the moment…)

Tuesday was Day 3 of the Virtues seminar, and I was presenting some ideas and exercises on COMMITMENT. In part to counter-balance some of the syrupy-sweet or new-age ethereal music that had been played – but mainly to jumpstart my own courage (and humility!) – I went LIVE. I played a perverse kind of musical chairs (If you call that music. If you call those chairs!) with my new best friends. I had them scribbling some ideas in response to questions and challenges, and I (mercifully) didn’t give them much time to write. Mercifully, because their writing time was defined by my playing of “A Blues Riff”, first very slowly (à la Week 2 and 3) and, later in the exercise, as fast as I could go. Going public. Visible (and risible) commitment. (Merde, did I make a lot of mistakes!) Concentration was probably hard for them, as I inserted some startlingly realistic enactments of mock frustration. It was lively, let’s say that, and we laughed a lot. (Commitment is too often a grim, ominous and guy-unfriendly concept.) And that turned out to be my playing for the day, because I wasn’t back to my borrowed bunk ‘til 1:30 a.m., with an important meeting about the Old Dog Year the next morning, bright and early. But most importantly, I chose an intimate circle of gracious encouragement. So many pats on the back, so much praise for this tiny outreach to the Muse of music. I smiled and smiled.

The Wednesday meeting was an assessment of interest about this Guitarzan spasm of learning and all the on-line thinking I’m doing about it. Interest? ‘Fraid not. A busy man had the courtesy to indulge me with a meeting but hadn’t even looked at the submitted collection of entries on the first 31 days of the Old DogYear. Garn! I’ve learned what doesn’t work, anyway. And then it was the long trip home and another exhausted midnight guitar run. Commitment feels strong, though confidence is wobbling. This would have been the night of my second group lesson, but I missed it. I wonder how much farther KW took us.

The end of the week found me back in the beloved basement. Same old stuff. The dullard within. But doing all this repetition feels like early summer days, when the strengthening sun slowly burns off the fog of morning. KW had thrown lots of chords at us, and they’re coming. I’m starting to remember how to configure the C chord, but I’m also hearing what C sounds like and how it speaks to G and D. The little finger-picking sequence that the guitar guru showed us, an initially unruly little gang of 4 notes, began to resolve itself into a smooth and brainless pattern. Look, Ma, no eyes! It’s very relaxing, actually, quite a mind-emptying finger-dance where the digits are starting to remember their steps without my help. Sweet. A little less old. A little less blue.

And a LOT less borrowed, broken-necked Dégas guitar because, on Sunday, I finally pulled a Major Commitment Trigger by buying A NEW GUITAR. My guitar! I wanted to dance and giggle but, to my credit (or shame), I took it all in stride. It’s a Walden guitar – a D550, baby! – a solid-topped beauty that I got on sale for $200 at the Ottawa Folklore Centre. It’s a folk guitar, not low-rent classical as the Dégas was, so the strings are metal rather than nylon. The B and high E strings are like razor wire, so there is another level of fingertip toughening to come. They’re also the same colour as the – what is it, the pick-guard?—that guitar-body armour below the sound hole, so these eyes have trouble picking them out. Guitar Guy at the OFC spoke warmly and knowingly about my Walden, and I feel good about this machine. I bought a stand, an electronic tuner and a humidifier, none of which I know how to work yet. The humidifier is a fairly simple and obvious thing, though I hadn’t considered how dryness could affect a wooden instrument. I’m not sure how it sits, so that’ll be Question 67 or 68 when I go for the next groupthink lesson in a couple of days.

It’ll be fun to show off my new lovely, but I’m scared to play with her. She makes sweet and unfamiliar sounds that my borrowed love was incapable of making. The music we made was obviously much more full and rich, but I strummed as if I was nervously coaxing melody from a crystal vase. I missed the Dégas. This new friend doesn’t yet sit comfortably with me. I wanted to whale away with my mock solos and percussive energy, but I felt nervous and reserved. I wanted things to feel comfortable right away, ‘cause heck, she’s beautiful, she has a gorgeous voice and body, it’s a fresh and exciting start and besides, that first date had cost me a pretty penny! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there were those awkward pauses in the conversation, that I was unsure about how to treat her and how she might respond to my overtures. It was a tense kind of fun, though, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing each other again.

ODY: 34/365

I drove nearly six hours today and caught the last quarter of a high school girls’ basketball game featuring my old friend The Don’s team. The coach and I grabbed a quick post mortem pizza, and then I was off to visit my dear and declining, my barely but contentedly pre-mortem Mum. While there may still be hope for her fourth-born child, there are no more new tricks for this noble Lady. There’s not much left of her at all, now, unless you count a radiantly kind heart and a mind that, while it may not remember my visit ten minutes later, can sing the Oakwood High fight song from the 1930s and recite the 23rd Psalm. She smiles at me even when she’s not sure what I’ve said. “I’m happy with my lot,” she murmurs to me. “I’ve had good kids.”

Another hour got me to my big sister’s place, where I grazed near her fridge just like I lurked around my mother’s all those decades ago. For all my mocking of mid-life charges at windmills large and small, I do have to give myself a smidgeon of credit, though. In spite of cross-eyed weariness and my preference for Stealth Practices, I started messing around with the strings even while Sister Pamela and I caught up on some of the down-home news. And then I forced myself to do some determined if bleary playing before sleep. So yeah, this entry is a day late and several ideas short. But it’s almost five weeks now. I’m not sure who will come and what it means if they do, but I’m Building It. I am never so happy as when I am building something: a skill, an organization, a graceful sentence or a fresh capacity. Confidence in the young. Hope among the disappointed. Peace for the aging. Friskiness in my fingers…