quo vadis? must be
going the right way if you
end up in right place

Quo vadis?

So might I have been asked 63 years ago today, July 17, 1960, the day I was born.

Quo vadis or ‘where are you going?’

63 years is 22995 days to make decisions every day about where I was going.

Each day filled with crossroads and door ways to paths not taken.

Which way to turn?

Which path to take?

Which path to not take?

Quo vadis INDEED.

In the essay Quo vadimus? by E. B. White published in the May 16, 1930 of the New Yorker Magazine where Mr. White writes about a man who stops people and asks, ‘“Where the hell are you going?”

And one man answers, “And all you want is a decent meal when it comes mealtime, isn’t it?’ asked my friend. “And a warm place to sleep when it comes night,”’ he added quickly, almost eagerly.”

Mr. White ends with this line, And we continued on our lonely and imponderable ways.

For the past 63 years I have blundered and mis-stepped as I continued on my lonely and imponderable way.

Last 4th of July, I got to spend the day with my wife and my kids and my grandchildren.

(Have I told you about my Grandchildren lately?)

I guess that on my lonely and imponderable way through these last 63 years, I must have made a lot of the right choices at my crossroads and doors to the paths not taken as I sure seem to have ended up in the right place.

epiphany when
I met paint – didn’t know word
artist, what it meant

I caught an interview with Jaune Quick-to-See Smith on CBS Sunday Morning.

There is or there used to be a saying that they wrap fish in yesterday’s newspapers.

After 20 years in TV news, I marvel at these wonderful production pieces like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Raising Indigenous voices throughout her art that too few people watched and will ever see.

I remember the number of times people would reach out to the TV station I worked at in Grand Rapids Michigan and say, “I was on your Bozo the Clown show sometime in January, 1973. Is it possible to get a copy of that show from your archives?”

The point being here there are no or at least very limited video archives and you can’t wrap fish up in them anyway.

But I digress.

The words in today’s haiku are from a quote in the piece that I heard when I watched the it this morning and I was intrigued enough to watch the video to copy down the quote.

I will try to learn more about Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

As is too easy to do online, I did find a quote of her’s that I am wrestling with.

She is quoted saying, Art should reveal the unknown, to those who lack the experience of seeing it.

Art should reveal the unknown is good.

But do I lack experience in seeing art or seeing the unknown.

And in seeing the unknown, if I see it, is it still unknown?

Take someone watching the tide come in for the first time.

They know what they see but the force bringing the water … is still unknown.

Thoughts to start a week and end the 62 year of my life with a new year starting tomorrow.

distinction between
the push of past versus the
pull of the future

Any historian worth his salt knows how to eschew monocausal explanations of human events — that is, the attribution of a single motive to any given decision.

And there is another necessary distinction, the one between motives and purposes (the first a push of the past, the second the pull of the future), for rare are also those instances when the purposes of a decision are singular or exclusive.

I was struck by this phrase written by by John Lukacs in his book, Five days in London, May 1940 (New Haven, ale University Press, 1999).

It brought to mind the old discussion (and forgive me for my use of pronouns) between the idea that men make their time (The important man theory of narrative history) against the idea that times make the men (The social view of history).

As I was taught, Hitler impacted his world or the world as it existed in the middle 1900’s created the vortex that vomited out a Hitler and had not Hitler existed, another person would have been created by the spirit of the time or Zeitgeist.

I guess I go both ways.

The boiling angst of post WWI Europe was going to lead to someone or something at sometime.

The fact is that Hitler DID show up in 1932 and his arrival on the stage had a great impact on the world at that time.

In the grand scope of things, 20 or 30 years either way in the history of the world may not mean much, but for those people alive and soon to be dead, that Hitler showed up in 1932, the man and his times had a great impact.

So I DO think that the former President could have been created by the times.

But the man and the moment, for better or for worse, met.

With consequences unforeseen, the man and the moment met.

The push of the past and the pull of the future called for someone and that someone turned out to be Mr. Trump.

Maybe not a single motive but I do feel that the term monocausal explanation kind fits as I think you can look at a lot, and I mean A LOT or what is impacting us today can be traced to this one person being in office.

It leads to easy speculation, on just one topic, how this country and this world would have reacted to COVID had the President of the United States and ‘Leader of the Free World” had provided leadership.

I think I will leave it there.

The push of the past, the pull of the future and the impact of one person.

Maybe this was best depicted in the life of George Bailey in the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” which was a box office failure and rarely watched until NBC discovered it as a cheap holiday on air filler but I digress.

I imagined a time where an Angel came down to me and asked had I ever thought about a world where I hadn’t been born.

He snaps his fingers and we visit a world where I had never been born and it turns out that everyone was better off and having a great time.

The Angel looks at me and shrugs and says sorry, sometimes these things don’t work out.

Then the Angel has me click my heals three times, I am wearing black loafers, and say there is no place home and bang, zoom here I am.

One of those rare those instances when the purposes of a decision was both singular and exclusive.