Ordinary Wonder

transcendent--"beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience;surpassing the ordinary; existing apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe".  Synonyms:supernatural, otherworldly, mystical, spiritual, sublime, ethereal.  Antonyms: ordinary, mundane

I have had my share of encounters with the "transcendent."  None of these happenings were drug or alcohol induced. I was not "on" anything. It's just that several different times in my life something has broken through the fabric of the ordinary, the mundane into some other dimension. What happened  can only be described as "mystical"  or "transcendent."  These experiences left me dazed and somewhat bewildered.  The upside of these experiences has been to put me in touch with a dimension of life that's beyond the ordinary.  The downside of these experiences is that the ordinary in comparison feels mundane. If you remove the "extra" from "extraordinary" then the "ordinary" feels rather empty.

One of my transcendent experiences happened while driving on Highway 78 east from Jasper to Birmingham, Alabama. It involved beautiful music on the radio and a church I was passing along the way. There was no danger to me or other motorists as the whole incident only lasted a matter of seconds. But "transcendence" seems to happen out of time. The most powerful transcendent experience of my life came in a dream in 1982. When I woke up from the dream I knew that my dream self was a part of a transformational experience.  My dream self then transformed my waking self into something new. Thinking about the dream even now, thirty seven years later, I am touched with its beauty, its power and its purpose. Another transcendent experience was on a sailboat in the late 1980s. This experience temporarily  filled me to overflowing with a sensation of buoyancy and wonder.  Although I was very much in the body through the entire experience, my psyche seemed to float to somewhere else.  From a passing of time perspective, this experience lasted about twenty minutes. This was considerably longer in duration than all my other transcendental experiences combined. Another thing that separates this experience with the others is that something very similar happened at about the same time to my best friend; so for the first time I was able to talk to someone who understood what I was saying. Unfortunately, my friend got killed before we could talk about it again. Other mystical experiences have touched me and changed me over the years.

With this said, the secret to abundant living is not to rack up as many transcendent experiences as possible, but to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.  This phenomenon is perhaps best illustrated in Thornton Wilder's play Our Town when the events of one ordinary day in one ordinary town are transformed to the extraordinary. But we do not need to watch a play or sit under a Bodhi tree to see the extraordinary at work. Extraordinary things happen all around us every single day. The sun, which is 93 million miles away, has a surface temperature of about 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet after the heat and light have traveled their eight minutes to earth and have punctured Earth's atmosphere, the average temperature at the equator is only 88 degrees. With a little sunscreen the heat of the sun is quite bearable to humans. Green living things on Earth use the light of the sun in a process called photosynthesis. This process synthesizes foods from carbon dioxide and water. Of all things, oxygen is a byproduct of this chemical interaction. Ninety nine percent of the gases in our atmosphere are oxygen and nitrogen. A human being dies if deprived of oxygen for about five minutes. In the time you've spent reading this, your life has been spared because of your breathing. Amazing. That the Earth synthesizes enough oxygen every day for all 7 billion of Earth's inhabitants is quite extraordinary.

UNICEF estimates that about 350,000 babies are born every day. That's 14,500 babies born every hour. Or that's 243 living, breathing human beings born in the world every single minute of every day. After nine months suspended in amniotic fluid, these tiny earthlings are now surviving on their own, breathing oxygen from the air like all of us.  Isn't  that extraordinary? ! The world could not contain the books about the extraordinary things  that happen to us every second of every day.

It has been quite some time since I have had a bona fide "transcendental experience". Do I miss them? Of course I do. Do I need them?  I must not or I would have them.  The thing I miss the most about "mystical experiences" is the sense of existential arrival and departure that they provide.  It's as though the experiences provide a cosmic signpost that reads "You are here."  So without some otherworldly guide to point the way, the Universe leaves that up to me. So what do I want to do with my life?   Where do I go from here? I think I'll go to the kitchen and brew a cup of coffee. My Keurig is quite extraordinary. 

Resting Glitch Face

I had an  interesting experience a couple of days ago. It was about 10:30 am and I was on my way to a doctor's office. I had been up over two hours.  I called the office en route and a woman I didn't know answered the phone. After a brief exchange I said "good bye", only she didn't hang up the phone. I could hear what she was being said in the office. The woman I had spoken to said "He sounded like he was about half asleep." And another responded "He always sounds that way."

I don't have a resting smile face. Unfortunately it's closer to a frown.  I am not an unhappy person it's just how my mouth and face settles in when I'm not thinking about anything in particular. It's something that I am aware of and that I work on. I had a boss once, a boss I eventually fired, who constantly commented on my facial expression.  Publicly and privately he would look at me with a forced smile and say, "Smile David!!" And I would flash a smile for his entertainment.  I was not smiling the morning I told him where to get off and then drove away in the car that I had already packed with my stuff.  Smiles aren't always necessary.  Smiles aren't always appropriate.

So the woman said that I "sounded half asleep."  I wasn't asleep and I wasn't even sleepy. I just have a rather low monotone voice until I get excited about something.  A "resting monotone" I guess you'd say. And I wasn't offended by what she said and have made no plans to talk to anyone about it.  I ask for and deserve the observation.

Boost, a cellular phone network, has a commercial that includes a husband referring to his wife's "resting glitch face."  I did a double take the first time I heard it. The next time I  understood what he was saying. I think mine is more like a "resting solemn face."  I catch that face in the mirror or another reflection from time to time and it scares me a bit, too.  But in spite of my best efforts, I'm stuck with my face! And you are too. Feel free to look away.

When I got to my doctor's office, the woman who made the comment wasn't even there and like I said, I was not compelled to say anything to anyone else about it.  I need to bring the tone of my voice up a notch or two and I need to smile more. But one reason I'm not that concerned about it is that children like me.  Children I know like me and children I don't know like me.  If my voice and face was too scary, I don't think children would hang around me.

So what's my take away from all this?   What is a lesson I can learn from it?  What I learned is to make sure I hang up the phone at the end of a conversation and in the meantime to be careful what I say about the person I was talking to. By the way, I didn't say how long I eavesdropped on those office ladies.  It was actually several minutes, but they stopped talking about me and I lost interest in their conversation. A "resting self-centered streak."

Just charge it !

charge account--"An existing line of credit at the business that issued it.

My best friend growing up was Billy Jones.  I met Billy the very first day of the first grade at the College Street Elementary School in Enterprise, Alabama.   To say that we “hit it off” would be a gross understatement.  We became friends before we knew just how easy our friendship would be.  Billy was seventeen days older than me.  I was born on the 19^th and he was born on the second.  His house was within walking distance of our school in one direction as my house was within walking distance from the other. This is to say that our houses were within walking distance of each other. And bicycles bisected  the distance at light speed.  From the first grade through the fourth grade when he had his accident, we were inseparable.  On Friday nights either I spent the night at his house or he spent the night at mine. And most afternoons we were playing at either house or in the ball field behind the school.

About halfway between our houses was a business known as “the dairy.”  It wasn’t an actual dairy because there were no cows.  No milk was produced at that location.  It could best be described as a milk distribution center.  For me it was a place to buy chocolate milk.  For a nickel I could buy one of those school lunchroom size cartons of chocolate milk.  Billy and I stopped there quite often on our coming and going to our houses.  One day though Billy said the magic words.  He had never used these words before and I had never heard them.  When she handed my carton to me, I gave her a nickel, but when she handed Billy his, he said, “Just charge it.”  And I was completely amazed by what happened next. Billy didn’t hand her any money.   I thought “charging it is the way to go.” A few days later we stopped at the dairy again and the same thing happened. When she handed the chocolate milk to Billy he said “Just charge it.”  So when she handed mine to  me, I said “Just charge mine too.”  She said, “Ok, David. Will do.”   This new system was working really well and we continued to charge our milk for several weeks.

One afternoon when I got home after school my mother asked me, “Are you charging milk at the dairy?” Now how in the world would she know that !?  I said, “Yes I am.”  She said, “David, we don’t even have a charge account at the dairy.  The milk man stopped by today to collect the money.”  Of course I had no idea what a charge account was or how the milk man found us, but I did know that my mother wasn’t happy with me.  My only punishment that I recall was having to listen to  a lengthy explanation of what a charge account entailed. And she made me promise not to ever charge anything without talking to her first. And I promised.  And I didn’t.

A few weeks before his accident, Billy and I built a fully functional space ship in the closet of his attic bedroom. We flew together to the outer edges of the Milky Way. And we always got home in time for supper. What happened just happened. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.  Billy’s brother thought it was his fault. I thought it was mine. But now I understand that we were both wrong. It was just a horrible accident. I visited Billy once in the hospital but because of my guilt I never went back to his house after he went home.  The next year because of all the school he had missed,  Billy was ‘put back” to repeat the fourth grade and I went on to the fifth.  And that was that.

A few weeks ago my wife and I bought a new car. The finance officer at the Nissan dealership asked what sort of financing we intended to do.  I looked at him, smiled and said, “Just charge it.”