Independence Day

Spent a good portion of the Fourth of July weekend here in town at something called "Old Home Day" -- a celebration of small town life which includes a free pancake breakfast (at the Congregational Church), a parade, the annual Friends of the Library booksale, a chicken BBQ at the firehouse, a cakewalk at Town Hall, and an ice cream social at the ballpark. This year I was one of the parade judges (along with the town's new Police Chief and a representative Selectman), which was a big step up from my first-year assignment in the dunking booth. Never again! My whole body still tightens up like Pavlov's drowned rat every time I hear a baseball strike metal.

Spent the actual Fourth itself visiting my brother in Connecticut, where my father was also visiting for a week from California. My dad is a pretty smart guy, and over the years he's gotten a lot of credit for being even smarter than he is, since every time I hear something wise and sagacious that I want to quote publicly, I tend to attribute it to him (regardless of where I may have originally heard it). Devoted a lot of our time to swimming in my brother's pool, and talking about "boat fever" -- this strange, stubborn Scandinavian midlife compulsion I feel to buy and own a sailboat. This is something that I've been daydreaming about ever since I first learned to sail as a kid, so much so that I have even started to organize the rest of my life around it.

Whenever I take time to think seriously about my career, Plan "A" is always to keep on moving straight Ahead: Adjust, Accommodate, and Adapt until everything is going just the way I want it to. Life is rarely a direct, linear path from Point A to Point B, but as long as you know where you are and where you want to go, the first option ought to be to get there as directly as possible.

Plan "B" is generally to Bail Out, and move on to something Better. Sometimes our plans are thwarted, and we need to regroup and reconsider our options. Sticking with a failing plan until you "crash and burn" is rarely the best option, regardless of what the President may have had to say to the friends, families and colleagues of our Iraqi War casualties. Notwithstanding all the recent debate surrounding "cut and run" it's easy to overlook the fact that sometimes the winning strategy is a tactical retreat in order to regain the initiative, so that you can successfully approach your objective from another, more viable direction.

And finally, Plan "C" is basically to buy a boat and run away to Sea.... At bottom it's a Thoreauvian thing: simplify your life by getting rid of your superfluous stuff, and in doing so find the freedom to travel anywhere in the world...or at least anywhere touched by wind and at least six feet of navigable water. It may sound like mere escapism, and maybe it is. But I know I'm not the only human being who has ever felt this way. And some of them have actually weighed anchor and set sail.

Of course others (like Thoreau himself) have settled for being "widely traveled in Concord." Our sense of freedom really comes from the feeling that one free to determine their own destination, and thus their own destiny. It is an experience of liberation born of true "liberty" -- the knowledge/wisdom to set a course that suits us, and the ability/means to follow it. It's not REALLY about the boat. It's what the boat represents -- the freedom to change course as our desires change, and a vessel capable of carrying us wherever our hearts desire.

My father's take on all this was to contribute an enigmatic quotation: "Change may not bring about a better condition, but things will NEVER get better until they change" And then he provided a list of his own: Patience, Persistence, Performance. How do we achieve the change we dream of? First, we remain Patient: we allow things to develop in the fullness of time, rather than letting our own impatience get the best of us by tempting us to give up prematurely. But we must also be Persistent: keeping our goals in sight, and working toward them at every opportunity. And finally Performance: as we've all heard so many times, life is not a dress rehearsal; it requires that we deliver our very best every time we step out "on stage."

I'm still probably at least two years way from buying a "hole in the water into which I pour money," and it may be a decade or more before I actually feel ready to sail away into the sunrise. I may NEVER actually do any of this, no matter how much I may daydream about someday casting off. But the realization that "Plan C" is always out there makes Plans "A" and "B" that much more manageable in my mind. And that's the kind of Independence I've learned to cherish.