One of the most famous optical illusions.
It's either a young woman looking away,
or an old woman looking down.
"Its amazing how our perspective of life can change
simply by moving ourselves a few inches
or a lot of years."
--Ralph F. Couey
Copyright © 2020
by Ralph F. Couey
There is a scene in the film "Dead Poets Society" where a teacher, played so brilliantly by Robin Williams, invites his students to the front of the classroom to stand on top of the teacher's desk, and thus look at the room from an entirely different perspective. Leading teenagers on an exercise of this type can be frustrating, but the looks on those boys' faces as they took in this new point of view showed that they "got it." I've seen similar reactions in speech classes when a student went from their desk to the front of the room. They were comfortable at the desk. But in front, with all those eyes on them, the familiar was suddenly frightening.
The image at the top of this post is an exercise in perspective we call an optical illusion. There are actually two images there. One will occur immediately, the other not before several minutes spent in deep thought. Its the same artwork, but exists in two different points of view. There are many such kinds of things in life. There are basically three different perspectives. How we see things, how others see things, and how things really are. One of the most painful shifts a person can make is from seeing something with which we are familiar to the sudden realization that it was never that way at all. Or as Mark Twain put it, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”
Perspective is kind of a funny thing. It's not just a physical change, but could be a philosophical one that could forever alter one's view of the universe.
Early Monday morning, as I lay in bed, still wrapped in the glow of my new Mustang, it occurred to me that when the loan we had engaged was paid off, I would be 71 years old. This realization rocked me for reasons which I hadn't really considered. The next day, in a text conversation with my son, I mentioned this, explaining that in my younger days, six years was just...six years. From age 30 to 36, for example, nothing would have changed all that much. Or at least not that I would've have noticed. But these days, time is very much on my mind because I've reached the point in life where the road ahead is likely to be considerably shorter than the road behind. Our oldest grandchild, Diana, is now 14. When I make the last payment, she'll be 20. And they're already growing up too fast.
This restless line of thought may have started a couple of years ago, when I took time in the evenings to lay back in my zero gravity chair and contemplate the universe as it appeared in the skies above. I became familiar with some of the stars, but when I looked them up, I had a feel for the first time how immense the universe truly is.
One of my familiar sights is known as the summer triangle, which appears in the northern hemisphere skies. It consists of three stars arranged in a triangle, Vega, Deneb, and Altair. Of course, like a lot of asterisms and constellations, we see them as two-dimensional patterns against the backdrop of space. But in reality, the individual members of a particular formation usually lie at vastly different distances. In the case of the triangle, Altair is 16.6 light years distant. Vega, a familiar blue-white beacon, is 25 light years away. But the third member of this grouping, Cygnus, is a whopping 3,550 light years out there. Now, a light year is simply the distance light, at a speed of 186,000 miles per second (6.7 billion miles per hour) travels in an earth year of 365 days. That's about six trillion miles. What that means for us is when the light that hits my eyeball tonight left that star, humans in Greece, Cyprus, and Crete were just starting to craft written languages, some of which remain undeciphered today.
I think about stuff like that often, from which you could conclude that I am either enormously curious, or completely lacking in anything that could be remotely called a life.
The more I contemplated, I reasoned that perspective was not just about distance and time, but also the less-definable sense of place.
Cheryl and I have been increasingly nomadic in our lives together. But when she spoke of "home," she was always talking of Hawai'i. She was born here, grew up here, and most of her family is still here. But I have for a long time struggled with the idea that there was anyplace that I truly thought of as home. There is a quote that appears at the beginning of the Civil War epic "Gods and Generals" that says:
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land
where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth,
for the labors men go forth to,
for the sounds and accents that haunt it,
for whatever will give that early home
a familiar unmistakable difference
amidst the future widening of knowledge.
The best introduction to astronomy
is to think of the nightly heavens
as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.
-- George Eliot
It is a beautiful piece of writing which captures the highly personal relationship a person has with the first place they thought of as sanctuary against the world. But in all the places I've lived, single and married, I've never looked back on any of them as a sacred piece of earth. I've ruminated over this for years. But I think now that my problem is one of context.
I was born in Paris, Tennessee, and we moved from there to Memphis for the proverbial cup of coffee before going to Los Angeles. I have only one reliable memory from those years, sitting on the front porch with my mother listening to the reporting of Alan Shepherd's suborbital flight on the radio. Yes, the radio. LA has a few sporadic bits a pieces of recall, but in 1961 when I was six years old, we moved to Independence, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City. It was there that I spent my entire public school career, the first two years of college, the first two years of marriage, and the first year of parenthood. That's a lot of life to squeeze into 19 years. Later on, after leaving the Navy, we spent 14 years in Columbia, Missouri, where we raised our four kids all the way through high school. And yet, I don't feel a geographical kinship with either place. When we've been back to visit, I didn't feel any tugging of my heartstrings as we explored those places. Certainly there were a plethora of memories, but no real yearning to go back.
It's taken me a long time to realize why.
All those places I remember existed within a context. Independence was a context of growing up and entering adulthood. Columbia was in the context of raising children and trying to make ends meet. Those contexts no longer exist as a current reality, so while I remember those years, my current context is where, what, and who I am at this moment. When we leave Hawai'i for...wherever...the context of our lives will change once again. I guess I've always been a windshield kind of guy instead of a rear-view mirror kind of guy.
Yes, we yearn now for a home, a place where we can look around at the walls, the furniture...and yes, maybe the mess...and see an environment that reflects us; our lives and experiences. For years, when people asked me where home was, my reply was "wherever the motorcycle is parked." Now that I don't own one, I'll probably change that to "wherever the Mustang's parked. Oh, and wherever my lovely wife lives." (I bet if you listen real hard, you can hear her eyes roll.) More crudely, I might opine that home is a place where I can walk around in my underwear without the fear of upsetting someone.
But our trouble is that we don't really know where that place might be. There are a host of places where a retired couple can live inexpensively and have plenty to do. But in most of those places, we don't know anyone, or if we did, there's an increasingly morbid chance that they are no longer among the living. Our nomadic natures, except for a few incredible people, make it difficult to gain and keep friendships, something that really didn't bother us because we were both looking ahead, and not behind. But finding home among the thousands of possible places now requires us to turn around and look in a different direction.
There was a time when I thought that "home will always be home." Now, I append that with the phrase, "until its not." Cheryl now, after being back for a couple of years, has seen how Hawai'i and its people have changed. In a sense, her context for "home" no longer exists here. I guess we're not so much looking for a "place," as much as a new context.
There have been places and times when I really didn't want to be anywhere else. The years we were in Virginia, I spent a lot of time on the Appalachian Trail. Hiking up and down the hills through the dense forests and peaceful meadows felt like home to me. I was happy, comfortable, at peace, and except for the occasional bear, safe. There was also, an unforgettable day on my motorcycle racing along the twisty, windy mountain roads of western Pennsylvania on a gorgeous fall afternoon, the hillsides alight with autumn colors. But you can't live on a hiking trail, or on the back of a motorcycle. I may have raised the bar too high.
Life still ticks along, the days passing with increasing rapidity. While we toil, we are acutely aware that we have grandchildren thousands of miles distant who are growing up way too fast, and that we are missing the best years of their young lives. At some as yet indeterminable point in time, our reasons for being here in Honolulu will end, and we will finally be forced to make a decision, one place or another. The only thing we know for sure is that we can't afford to stay here. It's too freaking expensive.
We both have a lot of faith in God, who has heretofore steered us to a lot of different places to do many different things. But He's not much for offering previews of coming attractions. We will simply wait for that moment when that divine inspired opportunity presents itself, and climb on that particular golf cart.
But life has no scheduled end date, and it may well be that we will suddenly find ourselves before that heavenly gate. We will then hear that voice say, "Welcome home."
And then, we will finally know that we truly have arrived.
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