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 My Gift To You !

SO, this is the time and the season for giving.

 That being the case, I will give you all a gift.

 If you read this to the end, my gift to you, will be that you should feel much better about yourself after reading this.

You’re welcome!

This story happened several years ago, and I never shared it with anyone for a couple years. Not even Lisa!

Even then when I shared it, there are only a handful of people who knew the story I am about to share with you.

You’ll understand why in a moment.

It was several years ago, we are in the car and on our way to Lebanon Maine so Lisa and our God Daughter Amanda Poulin can sky dive. 

We get there and all is going well. 

They get registered and we begin our wait.

It isn’t long before the girls are called in to get their gear on and begin preparing to board the plane. Usually from this point on I don’t see them until they hit the ground. 

Lucky, for me they have a great little restaurant that serves all manner of food to tide me over until they land. 

They also have GREAT coffee!   Important to the story .

As I am sitting in my chair on the lawn waiting for them to board their plane,(drinking my 4th cup of coffee for the day )  I decided I need to hit the bathroom and get rid of some of the coffee I have consumed.

I walk over to the bathrooms and there is a line for both of the two unisex bathrooms.

Not a problem, I thought, I’ll just get in line.

 Being about fourth or fifth in line I assume I will be taking care of this issue in short order.

NOPE !  Not sure what was going on but after about 15 minutes I was still number 3 in line. 

At this point things are starting to become critical. I had three cups of coffee on the way down and was on my fourth, my bladder is telling me in a very serious way, that it’s time to get rid of at least a cup or two.

I nervously look around and I see no other options.  

I do see a path leading to several buildings set back in the trees. As 

I watch it looks like staff are coming and going using the path.

As the situation reaches a critical stage, I decide to quickly take the path and see where it goes.

Worst case scenario I can keep walking past anyone’s sight and find a tree to utilize if need be. Not my best option but things are getting desperate.

To my great delight the first building I come to has a sign on it that says, “Staff Bathroom” . Now it has the usual Male/female sign on the door indicating I should be able to use it without getting thrown out if I am caught!

I quickly surveyed the situation and luckily for me there is no one utilizing the bathroom at this time.

Now I want to take a moment and explain to you exactly what this bathroom looked like.

IT was SMALL. It was a room big enough to have a toilet and a sink and that’s it. I honestly expected to lift the lid and see a hole in the floor leading to a pit but to my surprise it was a bowl full of water. 

When I say this bathroom is small, I mean small. I think you could sit on the toilet and wash your hands at the same time.  Small room!!

I quickly step to the toilet, lift the lid, and give my bladder the needed relief It has been screaming for !

Now this toilet was an old toilet. You know the kind that has a horizontal handle on the water pipe on the back of the toilet and you just push it down to activate the water.

Once finished, I lean forward to push down the lever. 

Out of the corner of my eye I see a crudely drilled hole in the wall to my right . 

The hole is not the kind of hole perverts use to watch people use the restroom! 

 No, just a crudely cut hole that was twice as big as it needed to be to support the small chrome button that only partially stuck out of the hole.

Now that’s strange, I thought.

No sign, No directions. Nothing. Just a small button sticking out of a hole in the wall in a VERY small and crude bathroom. 

So, this is where things went terribly wrong and one of the reasons no one has heard this story since that day. 

Curiosity got the best of me, and I reached down and pushed the button. 

Now normally I pride myself in being very observant and I usually know what’s around me.

Within seconds I realized the error of my ways as I pushed the button.

The powers of observation that I was just bragging about above had failed me and I did not notice the small tube curling up from under the toilet bowls inside rim .

As I pushed the button a stream of water strong enough to put out a fire from 20 feet away shot out of that little pipe that I failed to notice, and hit me right in the middle of my chest. I jumped back in horror trying to figure out what had just happened !

 I quickly looked down to see the stream of water had left a wet streak from my chin all the way down to my jeans.

I had a 4-inch-wide wet streak up the entire front of me . 

I stood there shocked at being assaulted by a piece of porcelain! What? Why?  

As I looked in the mirror I was mortified to see the results of my fight with that little tube.

“Good Lord I can’t go out there like that!! What am I going to do ???” I said aloud.

In what seemed like minutes but was only seconds, I hatched a plan to hide my stupidity. A plan I should have thought through better.

I can’t dry my shirt, the streak is soaking wet. That little tube put out a LOT of water with a substantial amount of pressure!

WELL, I thought to myself , I have to eliminate the pattern! 

I started using tap water to add water to the shirt so that the water wasn’t such an obvious streak caused by my little plastic pipe friend.

The more water I added to the shirt the more stupid it all looked, and I finally reached a point where I decided it was just time to give up. 

Face the humility of my actions and go back out into the world.

So, with a shirt that now looks like I was hit by a VERY large water balloon I opened the door and stepped out of the bathroom and into the world.

Several steps along the path headed back to the Jump site I met another guy headed towards the bathroom. He didn’t look like a staff member as he didn’t have the company clothing on. 

He looked like a guy in a despite search for a place to get rid of coffee and I knew that look well.

As we quickly pass each other along the path our eyes meet for just a second.

As I passed him, I said the four words I wish someone had said to me.

As I passed on the trail I simply said in a sheepish voice.

DON’T PUSH THE BUTTON !

Fingerprints

As we grow older, life takes us on a path of twists and turns.

Unfortunately, we often lose track of people that are important to us.

People who were close once. 

People we engaged with every day.

We don’t purposefully stop paying attention, sadly it just happens.

We stop looking, stop seeing, and slowly things fade away.

It had been a long time since I TRULY saw him. 

It's been a long time since I really looked at the details that time has created.

To say I was surprised at how he looked would be an understatement.

Although I see him often, I never really looked or focused on the details. 

A quick nod or acknowledgement and back to life.

The memory of him that I carry with me, is as a younger man, stuck in his youth as thought time had somehow frozen. 

He was thin then.

 Not muscular by any means but tall, sporting a look that youth will afford those who lack the appreciation of what they have. 

A look they will someday miss.

 A look that seems to be here one day and is gone the next.

It was clear that time had taken its toll as it always does. 

Those features so clearly present in my memory are long gone!

His swagger that I remember from years ago has been replaced with a slowed gait, that sense of confidence seems to have faded with the passing of time.

When I recently took the time to look at his face closely, I almost didn’t recognize him. 

My memory of him was erased and reality quickly took its place.

Was he the same person I remember?

If his looks had changed that much, what else was different?

Although he looked different, on the inside was he still the same person I knew all those years ago?

 He may be the same person I remember him to be, but I feel the man of today has little in common with the man he was so long ago.

That person from years ago that I remember so vividly and that I can see so clearly,

NO as I look in the mirror, the only thing I seem to have in common with that young man from long ago. 

Are fingerprints.

Lessons from the Tide

As we get out of the truck the mist hits us directly in our face. It’s 48 degrees, foggy with a heavy mist.

I pull the hood of my rain jacket up and point my face to the ground as we make our way over the high rock berm and onto the beach.

We are at Jasper beach, a beach in Machiasport Maine. 

 The beach is made up entirely of polished red hued Jasper stones. 

A beach like nothing I had seen before.

As the tide goes in and out the stones roll against each other and create an almost singing sound. 

It really is something to hear.

As I mentioned before it’s a very cool and foggy day, so we have the entire beach to ourselves.

We waste no time and start walking and looking down at the magnificent stones that make up Jasper beach. 

As we walk further down the beach my eyes catch something in the fog that I can't make out.

It seems to be a row of something sticking out of the stones off in the distance. 

As we get closer it becomes clear that what we see is all that remains of what was once a pier or a structure of some kind.

They only stick out of the stones a foot or two as the rest has long been taken by time.

As we stand there looking at what remains, we talk about what could it be? A pier for what? There is no town here. No long-ago settlement existed close by.  

No railroad or road to connect to that ran close to the beach. 

 So what could it have been and how long ago was it built?

It doesn’t even go all the way to the shoreline.  

 It stops way before the high tide mark. 

Very strange indeed.

All that remains is a whisper from the past of a story we may never know but enjoyed thinking about.

After a few minutes we moved further down the beach towards what looked like caves in the cliff walls.

The caves were so interesting.

 It cost me wet feet to get to them as I crossed a small stream that drained a backwater marsh, but it was more than worth it. 

There were four caves. 

One, you could go in one side and out the other and 3 that went into the cliff. The deepest was close to 25 feet into the cliff wall.

Had anyone ever used it to escape the weather or a storm? Was it ever used for shelter? 

I don’t know but my imagination ran wild and there were countless stories of what could have happened there over the hundreds to thousands of years those caves have existed.

Stories that no one will ever know for sure but fun to think about.

After exploring the caves while Lisa watched from the dry side of the stream, I crossed again, ensuring a complete soaking of my feet before we headed back to the truck in the mist. 

As we slowly walked along the beach, Lisa stopped and turned around and took this picture of our footprints on the beach. 

This picture in so many ways reflects our journey through life.

Although we make tracks as we walk along in life. Like the tide that cleared the track we left on the beach that day. 

Time will do the same with our tracks in life.  

Regardless of the length of your life’s journey, time, like the tide will eventually erase your tracks and all that will be left is the memory of what was, 

in those who knew.

I guess the lesson to learn from the tide,

is that your tracks will never last and you too will fade into a memory! 

Make sure you are enjoying the walk.

TIME

 Warning! Warning! Warning!

Very Long and probably incoherent but "might" be worth reading but no promises.

As many of you know. This past summer I celebrated my 60th trip around the sun.

Not a particularly special event nor is it any great achievement on my part. 

It’s simply a number and a moment that recognizes the passing of time. 

For me turning 60 seemed to have caused a minor shift in thinking.

Although turning 60 has created no drastic physical or emotional change in me. It did trigger something that I have been trying to figure out. 

Leading up to the big 60 I felt different. Things seemed different.

 I couldn’t put my finger on it! 

Was I feeling melancholy?

 Was I starting to sense my mortality?

 Was regret from the past creeping in and rearing its ugly head ?

No, none of those seemed to be able to explain the shift in my emotions and my thinking. 

The day came and went and like everyone else who hits this milestone of life,  little if anything changed in my day to day.

And yet it had. Inside something was different.

But what ?

This morning somewhere around 3 am my brain came to life ( as it often does ) and the answer was clear.

The answer is …………..Time

Yes ,  leading up to and since my birthday , what has changed is my thoughts and understanding of Time. 

Time left.

Time wasted. 

Time cherished 

Time regretted .

What has shifted for me is the concept of  time and how I now look at it. 

I couldn’t see this while I was going through this shift in thinking, but now it all makes sense.

Before I go any further let’s look at time. What is it ?

Well actually, “ time “ in and of itself, doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as a TIME. You can’t hold it in your hand. You can’t see it, change it, or affect it.

No time itself doesn’t exist as an object.

What I’ve come to realize is that time is simply the measure of brief moments of existence.

So, let’s pause for a moment and let’s look at reality or existence. What is it?

Does history exist ?  Is the future a real thing?

I would argue that neither the past nor the future exist anywhere but in our mind. 

The only reality is the current moment you and I are in at this exact moment.

Once that moment is gone, it only exists in our thoughts. You can’t physically go back in time. 

Once gone, a moment ceases to exist except in our mind or the collective mind of our society.

Let me give you an example. If I walk alone into the woods and I snap my fingers . The second the sound has faded, that moment in time no longer exists. The snap is forever gone , EXCEPT in the memory I have of the snap. That moment and everything in it has been replaced with a new moment and the snap is now not a part of current reality.

The snap only exists now in a thought string that I will carry with me until that leaves me and at that point the snap and the moment in “time” the snap took place will be gone from existence forever.

Now if lisa was with me and witnessed the Snap, that moment in time would also live in her memory. Our collective memory of the snap would live on BUT the actual snap and the moment in time the snap took place does not exist anymore. Merely our memory of the moment.

The same thing holds true with the future . The future doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as the future. You can’t hold it, you can’t leave this moment and go there , Future time Like past time is something that lives within our minds.

Now lucky for us our world is a very stable environment and for the MOST PART our minds can “predict” what the future could and should look like. But that too has no basis in reality,  its mearly a forward projection of our current state of existence. 

It doesn’t exist YET . We only hope what is now, is what is coming our way but again that lives within our mind and has no basis for reality.

Ask anyone who has had a tragedy or an accident lately if they knew or thought it was going to happen, the answer will be no.

Ask anyone who suddenly lost a loved one, if they ever dreamed that day would come so quickly and they will likely say no. Our “future” as perceived by us is only a narrative created by our mind and in reality doesn’t exist. There is nothing “there” in the future. 

Why because the future doesn’t exist. The only thing that is real is the current moment.

Our reality is a combination of anticipation of moments to come,  the reality of the moment as we live it, and the string of memories we retain as that moment fades and is replaced by the next. 

When you look at those three things,  it’s easy to see that only one is real.

 This moment. The other two are thoughts in our minds. One predictive, one in memory but neither are real .

 The only thing that exists is this current moment. 

So, what is time? 

Well it’s really three things. 

Perceived time. Anticipation of what will come ( lives in our mind and is not real)

Current moment. The only thing that is real, and is the only one we can do anything with or impact.

Memory time. Again the collective memories of the real moments we have lived ( again live in our minds and have no basis in reality, except through  thought strings we keep)

Time and our perception of the passing of time ,  is when we combine all three into a seamless narrative .

 When we do that, we are able to feel and perceive the passage of time.

Without all three,  time and the passing of time,  would not work 

So, by now you are surely asking yourself,  what in the world is my point,  and what does this have to do with turning 60.

Glad you asked.

If you internalize what I have said above, and you truly understand the ramifications you should understand where your priorities should be in life.

This moment, right now,  is the only place where you can do anything. This is the only reality we have.

Focusing on memories of the past. Dwelling on mistakes that are now simply thought strings weaving through our mind,  is pointless.

Worrying about and fantasizing about the future that also doesn’t exist is also a waste of time .

Both serve no purpose and add no value to your life as you live it in this moment.

Now let me clarify. You can use THIS MOMENT to impact both.

Now wait a minute AL,  you just said they weren’t real. If they are not real, then how can we affect them in our current moment?

Great question .

The past and the actions you took in the past are GONE . They do not exist anymore except in your mind and the mind of those impacted.

 BUT the ramifications of those moments in time could be lingering into your current moment. The only moment that is real.

Let me give you an example. If you hurt a friend 20 years ago and it caused an end to your friendship. There is NOTHING you can do to change the past. You can’t go back and do it over , you can’t pretend it didn’t happen. The memory thread of that event exists in  your mind and the mind of the person you hurt. 

It’s in the collective  consciousness of those involved that the event  lives on. THAT cannot be changed.

All you can do is use THIS moment to try and change the reality that exists NOW , The reality of not having your friend anymore.

 BECAUSE of a moment in time that is now gone.  The ramifications of those previous actions still exist, 

That is something you can work on!  

The past doesn’t exist, but the outcomes of those events may still exist in this moment.

Those  lingering outcomes you can use the current moment to have an impact on. But all you have is the current moments because that is all there is to reality.

What about the future ?   Another great question. If the future doesn’t exist, do we hopelessly just wait until those moments manifest themselves as current time and accept what that moment brings us.

Well, we sure can, and so many do, they take what life brings them and deal with it in the moment when it arrives.

But even though the future doesn’t exist we can perceive a future. Again, a future rooted completely in our Minds with no basis in reality.

Lucky for us. Most of our existence is so stable that we can conceive a future where the sun rises and sets. A future where the current moment continues forward, and we can anticipate the changes coming based on current conditions and the memories we have of how the past moments have led to this moment. Yes, we can “somewhat” predict what our future MIGHT be.

But as we all know,  the story we paint in our mind rarely ends up coming into existence. Death, tragedy, and unexpected events change our perceived future as if to only solidify that the future does not exist until it becomes the current moment.

Now we can certainly do our best to create the future we would like. School, Training, faith, making decisions that we HOPE will help create the future we want . BUT again, the future doesn’t exist, and we are merely Hedging our bets that actions today will impact the coming moments in our lives.

That is a good bet to take and something well worth doing vs simply waiting to see what life has in store for you .

So, what does all this mean? What’s the point ? 

The point is the only real thing we have is this MOMENT right now.  The only place we have to work on the memories from the past or the desires for the future is this moment.

By the time you read this the moments I took to write this will be gone and will only exist in the thought strings of my mind. To the entire world as a whole. Those moments did not and do not exist. 

The only existence left is my memory of those moments and the outcome. 

This rambling.

So again, what in the world does this have to do with turning 60 and the feelings I’ve had about it?

Simply that this morning at 3am it all came together and made sense.

It’s all about TIME. The only time that exists. 

The moment I am in at any given moment. 

I need to focus on that moment because it’s the only place I have to work. 

Feeling regret about events in the past is a waste. It’s gone. If I can mitigate the effects of bad decisions I made in the past, effects that still exist in the current moment, WONDERFUL! 

I need to use the current moment to mitigate those.

 If I can’t do anything about it, realize that the guilt, self-torture and doubt I feel over the event resides only within my mind and I need to let it go. That reality is gone, and I can do nothing about it.

Same with the future, instead of worrying about when I will die or who will go first, Lisa or me.

Instead of worrying about what health issue old age will greet me with , Dementia , mobility issues, quality of life issues? There are a thousand demons that may await this aging process.

No, instead of worrying about that perceived existence that is not real .

I need to focus on what I can do today to “hedge my bet” for the perceived moments I hope to have.

I have to accept  that until those future perceptions become real moments, the future, the outcome of my efforts will be unknown.

So the shift I have been going through but unable to see has been in a shift in the concept of time.

Instead of focusing on time wasted in the past, Time left in the future and all the baggage that accompanies these perspectives.

I have come to realize that the only TIME that matters is Now. This moment, what am I doing with the only time that is real.

How do I make the most of this moment (or time) as it is the only one that matters and the only one that I can actually do something within. 

I have to learn to enjoy THIS MOMENT.

Make the most of THIS MOMENT

Stop worrying about tomorrow, next year, or decades from now as that reality doesn’t exist.

Reality is now. All else lives in the mind.

Everything else is just battles in my mind that are only real if I allow them to be.

What time are you focusing on?