It’s Sunday, and I Spent Most of Today Combobulating
Mostly, we humans don’t spend enough time doing that, instead, running around in a constant state of discombobulation.
It’s easy to fall into that trap, particularly if you pay attention to what’s going on in the world. That’s what I write about, and so I am expected to keep a wary, if watery, eye focused on the ball, in hope of not missing the current-events equivalent of a ground ball between the legs of the infielder.
Forgive the baseball metaphor, but discombobulation surrounds us in our daily lives.
Someone left the car door ajar one night, not long ago, and the overhead light ran the battery down, while I was already late for an appointment.
COP 30, our probable last cop-out at saving ourselves environmentally, is about to meet in Belém, Brazil, celebrating three decades of picking our noses, while superstorms rage, forests burn and oceans heat. The world is in a state of muddleheadedness at the moment, as wars rage in at least two genocides. Combobulation is surely required at the moment, on the part of those who hold the reins of all these charging horses.
But no.
In the middle of all that, Billie Eilish is being attacked on social media for giving $millions to feed the world, while challenging $billionaire ‘shorties’ (Bezos and Zuck are both 5ft 7in) to do the same. She is under attack on social media, while my rent is overdue. Yours may be as well in these unsettled economic times.
It’s enough to send one for a lie-down, and that’s where I have gone.
Liedowns are a great generator of combobulation and I try to be reasonably creative in my life, having spent the first half of it as a landscape architect, the second as a writer. But all that mental concentration takes downtime, requiring hours and sometimes entire days gazing at a fire in the fireplace, or clouds drifting, in order to avoid discombobulation.
Picasso once said that ‘all children are born artists, only to have creativity beaten out of them by life’ (or words to that effect). He also claimed that ‘action is the foundational key to all success.’ Unlike the great man, I still require quiet, sensory time.
We’re all different, and I respect that, but I sometimes wonder if the world leaders, who seem to get us in such trouble, are spending enough time combobulating.
The politics of war, starvation, genocide and billionaires are all, to my mind, inversions of creativity. They are, none of them, accidents and seldom occur in the natural world.
Squirrels do not raise oak trees, they are sufficiently rewarded merely to live among them. Buffalo do not make war among buffalo. Sheep do not secretively plan battles against wolves, no matter the Far Side cartoons.
Kurt Vonnegut claims ‘our big brains are killing us,’ and he may be right.
Yet, having climbed out of the wreckage of a fire-bombed Dresden, he wrote Slaughterhouse Five, all the evidence required to refute the accusation. Those same, or similar, big brains enabled Picasso, Zaha Hadid, Thomas Jefferson and Einstein. Our current president proves that a big ego is no substitute for a big brain, no matter its lethality.
So, Vonnegut may have misspoken.
Rolling over on the sofa, to ease my back, I wonder at the reality of not being able to hold my own at chess against my otherwise wonderful neighbor here at the summer house. Last year he held an 83-22 advantage and, so far this year, despite my efforts to learn, we are 75-18. I’m better than that, but I’m also a better writer than my book sales would attest. Closing games in chess are my weakness, and marketing fails my attention selling my books.
These are things I ponder in all or part of the ten decades I’ve wandered through, and gazed upon, my small portion of the planet.
I’m interested in how (or if) you combobulate on Sundays, or at all.
Like chicken soup, it might not help, but it wouldn’t hurt.