By the time we reach a certain age we realize that our perceptions of ourselves are not how the rest of the world sees us. For some, this realization comes earlier than others; perhaps someone tactfully pulled us aside and corrected us, or maybe through an experience we became aware that we are not quite who we imagined ourselves to be. Most of the time we just keep on doing what we think looks and feels right until we bump into something bigger.
A whole army of Greek philosophers debated this issue of what constitutes our reality, the tug-of-war between our actions and our thoughts. I know a few of these guys because I read their thoughts on a T-shirt:
Aristotle said: “To be is to do”
Socrates said: “To do is to be”
Sinatra said: “Do-be-do-be-do”
When it comes to my own actions, for example, my perception of myself is that I’m reasonably coordinated and able to move through the world with relative poise and agility. I play some sports, involve myself with physical activities of all sorts, swim and even jump over the occasional object. Once I even won a contest to see who could do the most pull-ups from a low tree branch. Over time I have developed a confident perception that my movements, my physical path through the world, is part of the liquid salve that helps lubricate the rusty, clanky mechanisms of human activity.
After last week’s getaway trip to Arizona where my coordination came into serious question, I realize I’ve been hiding behind some serious denial. I’ll get to more of the details later, but an incident with my suitcase caused me to take stock of my sad history of faux pas and seek help in the general area of idiocy. Quite honestly, I have hit, broken, ran over, fell on, and bumped into literally every object in my house. I have stepped on, elbowed, knocked heads with, and collided with all members of my family, church friends, and acquaintances. I won’t go into details, but if you just take the damage my lack of coordination has caused in petting zoos alone, I should be a prime candidate for wearing an ankle monitor.
I am, in short, a do-be-do-be-do waiting to happen, a “sad, strange little man” sticking my finger in the cupcake of life. Where I got the idea that I could effortlessly slip away on a vacation without a ripple in the middle of winter I have no idea.
To start with, my wife and I are not world travelers by any stretch. We circulate from the kitchen to the bathroom, open a closet here and there, and wave at the mail lady. We like our home quite a bit, and even in the winter when it appears the doldrums will take over, we don’t ever feel that leaving town is going to fix our attitudes. Now I know it’s not going to correct my coordination either. So, when we made big plans to take in some sights out in beautiful Scottsdale, like the Botanical Garden and The World’s Greatest Arabian Horse Show, I thought the excitement of a new environment would carry the day. I was going somewhere warm, I was with friends, and I had a new piece of luggage shaped like the one handcuffed to the President wrist protecting the nuclear strike codes.
Inside the case I had used the utmost precision to pack my belongings. I had tiny versions of all my toiletries, saved from a weekend at the Marriott Courtyard in 1992. I had a small tube of Crest (Crestette), one pieces of dental flo (singular of floss), a collapsible toothbrush (a toothbro) and small bottle that combined soap, shampoo, conditioner and could double as shave cream or deodorant depending on the size of your armpits.
I took one pair of pants made from the same material as a parachute, a coffee maker that brews, sautés, or macchiatos with foam, and pair of monoculars, which is just one onucular, or technically half a pair of binoculars. Anyway, they were packed for those occasions when I would be looking at half of something with just one eye, or if I found myself wanting to imitate Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Planning for everything, I even bought a book guaranteed to help me sleep through any turbulence. For those of you who are gardeners, it was titled Fifty Plants that Changed the Course of History. By the way, I had to stop reading the book during the flight when I read that the pineapple plant was involved in the invention of an unpronounceable polymer called Polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, or plastic, that made up most of the interior of the plane I was on. I could no longer hope that reading that book would relax me if things got choppy when I had no trust in a pineapple polymer to sustain my flight at 38,000 feet.
Still, I felt ready for the trip. My luggage was organized like a Zen Garden, weather was good, planes were running on schedule, security people were smiling at me, and my bowels had moved, a feat of coordination in and of itself. Although this is way too personal to mention in a podcast, there is only one place we feel more helpless than when we are on a plane, and that is when we are on a plane on a toilet seat. You could say I felt very confident and prepared, which gave me a momentary vision of being in control of the gears of life that run the “Great Machine.” I was in that imaginary space, sort of like Leonardo da Vinci when he watched his the catapult invention launch a pine tree, or when the astronomer Copernicus witnessed Mars rotating around the earth.
But I was about to get a lesson in just how off course my sense of reality was. Right out of the first gate, my suitcase bolted away from me like a three-year-old on a sugar diet. Bolstered by wheels that could rotate in any directions independent of each other, my NASA-approved luggage glided gracefully away like Ginger Rogers. If you had bought a ticket for this, you would have teared up and had a past vision of your mom dancing with a broom in the kitchen. You would have wished your dad could have been there, and that he would have snuck up behind your mom and, gently taking the broom, finished sweeping the floor for her. Then, as if floating on air, he would have put the broom romantically back in her arms. Finally, you would have realized that these are the reasons you often lose touch with reality.
As my luggage shifted into cruise control, it careened down a hermetically sealed off-ramp and came to rests on a rubber mat under a drinking fountain, which came on automatically. There was a sinister looking child waiting in line next to me who watched the whole thing happen. Holding his toy superhero, he looked up at me warily, as if my luggage had stolen some special power from his toy. I could only shrug my shoulders to his parents and apologize.
“Wherever you’re going, I don’t want to go there,” his father remarked blandly.
That night, after reaching my destination and settling in, I considered abandoning my suitcase out in the saguaro desert where it would feel perfectly at home with the array of renegade exotic plants, skyscraping cacti, and things that slither about. Instead, I fell asleep thinking of the movie I, Robot and dreamt my suitcase crawled in bed with me and offered me a free tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s house if I would take along two of his best Samsonite friends.
I woke up in a cold sweat, unusual for Arizona, and was thankful that I was on a real vacation and that my suitcase could retire, at least for a week, like everyone else in Scottsdale.