The Old Man and Me - or - Dextera domini/dei

So I had been reading The Best of Joe Haldeman, a group of short stories by of course Joe Haldeman (duh!).

One of the stories that got a lot of attention in this collection, winning the Hugo and Nebula, is  “The Hemingway Hoax”.

I really enjoyed it, though if I am going to go into admitting anything I so, so, SO struggle with short-story collections. I don’t know why, though I would lean towards a lacking in attention span (which wouldn’t really make sense since it’s a group of short stories!).

So, back to The Hemingway Hoax…..It’s a little time-travel, a little classic manly lion hunting literature, at once reminding of Slaughterhouse Five and a bit of Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice.

After reading it though, I got to thinking, what have I ever read of Hemingway?

Hmmm. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero.

So we, the Mrs. and I, end up at the library - shocking I know, and on a whim - since we were actually in line to checking out (with her books) I remembered Ernest! So I get out of line and ran over the the H’s and start going through them until I come to the manly lion hunter section; Ernest Hemingway.

I quickly scan the available books and make my selection; The Old Man and The Sea.

I started reading it when we got home and I didn’t put it down until I was done - this sounds like one of those “reviews” that says I couldn’t put it down and read all night, (which I couldn’t) but it is more a statement of fact which is in itself, for me, a rarity because I have never considered myself a fast reader, if anything, I would say the opposite.

What The Old Man and The Sea was, was compelling.

At the same time, The Old Man and The Sea is a writing class, a story, and a parable of the world - Hemm’s, yours, & mine.

A picture that kept coming back to me as I read was, “Vanity of vanities,...

What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”

Both are timely in my life right now. I try to be one of those reflective people that stops and takes a hard look at my own life, see where I am, have the foresight to see where I want to go, see what am learning or what I have recently learned.

This is where I literally stop and stare at the “page” and wonder, “So what have I learned?”

And so I answer; Be patient when asking God for an answer, listen carefully when He does, meditate on what it means afterwards.

In the last couple of weeks I have written some other posts that were never posted because for me, my writing has always been a way for me to clear my head. I write and write and then look to see what it is that was on my mind and to be honest the last few times there was really no clear answer or definition, clarity in what I hoped to see, so those writings stayed safely tucked away on the cloud….wherever that is.  

But then as they say - I had a moment of clarity.

It’s funny, as I look back at the things I had written, the answers were there, I just wasn’t sure those were the right answers. The clarity wasn’t clear.

Answers have to be taken in measure, slowly, in balance, methodical.

Like eating an elephant, one bite at a time.

When people talk of God, the conversation of “we’re not robots” is never a far one and I would agree, we’re not. But I would say that we are little children, and little children are adamant that they know best and more than their parent(s). You see it in the two year old child as she pushes the adult hand away crying out, “I do it!”

It’s not so cute, I don’t care what you say.

That is what I believe we are, little children that think we can do it, pushing away the hand of someone greater, thinking that we know enough to be able to handle whatever situation(s) we’re faced with or in.

Why does God allow bad things to happen? Now there’s the big meaty question inside all of this, right? Here is what I believe is true - He allows us to live in our own mistakes and to see what we will do with it - and I would add - hoping that we bring it to Him since it was our own thinking that got us in that situation to begin with, so we need other thinking (learning) to get out of it.

Often though, I believe that if we could see it we would slap the hand of “Divine Intervention” away crying out, “I do it!”

This is not to say we are more powerful than Him, it’s more a statement of our condition, not His. Little children that think we are so smart and powerful that we got this “situation” under control.

I got this.

Now being a sci-fi guy I have to wonder, what if, when stepping into someone else’s life, we are thinking that we can and must “do something” here and now in this moment and in so doing that, slap the proverbial hand away?

That would alter the trajectory of what should have happened to what we made happen.

Now of course, we know that all things work out to His good pleasure, but what I’m saying is that in everything there is an opportunity to learn a particular thing, and if we act too hastily, we can prevent that learning, making it so that that person will likely have to learn that lesson all over again, and sometimes, painfully.

That is where the balance comes in. The Mrs. and I have been experiencing of late was that there were people that came into our lives asking for help and once we would help it seemed more like what they wanted was not necessarily help, but rather, someone to do it for them.

In Hemingway terms - people were asking us to teach them how to fish and as we would try to do so, they were actually asking instead for the fish.

I found myself asking myself again and again, why does it seem that I want more for people than it seems the people do?

It didn’t make sense. Technically, it still doesn’t, but I have at least understood some things that go along with it such as, little children, most times, learn only a particular way, and that unfortunately is quite often, the hard way - I know, because I have been one of those little children, off and on, that has made bad choices at times, slapped the hand away, tried to take care of it all on my own.

But I grow, I wait patiently for an answer, listen carefully when it comes, meditate on the answer.

I saw that in The Old Man and The Sea, glad that I see it on my life, hope to see it more in the lives of others.