December 26, 2019 – ‘Twas a whirlwind—planning, scheduling, shopping, decorating, wrapping, unwrapping, cooking, baking, eating, driving, drinking, visiting, entertaining, game-playing. The Big Holiday has passed, and people have scattered.
With the memories fresh, I reflect on certain encounters during the festivities. I feel myself shedding the chains of ignorance and the blinders of biases. The liberation, though, is unsettling. Through encounters with younger generations, I see my limited grasp of “knowing less and less about more and more.” As I grapple with the paradox of an expanded view of my narrow knowledge of things, I vacillate between panic and surrender, fearful that my life is but a leaf carried by the wind far out over boundless seas.
But then I tell myself that in my out-of-control state, what I can control is how I re-act. As an untethered leaf twirling in the wind over endless, stormy waters, I can react with calm, riding the whim of the wind. As I spin to the left, then right; floating up, then diving, spiraling high again, I can relax and enjoy the view. It’s all a matter of mind over matter. With zen as my pilot, some meaningful insight will surely appear.
As I was reminded from my encounters with young, bright minds, we live well into an era of Big Data—always present, but now to be tamed, harvested, crunched, analyzed, processed into algorithms, converted by AI to results unimagined by our forebears—I mean, by us . . . who, with a flag in the corner by portraits of Washington and Lincoln and roll-down maps above a chalkboard, memorized naively, Woodsworth, arithmetic function tables, and the Gettysburg Address.
I’ve always been a leaf attached to a tree of bias and habit. Forever, it seems, I’ve been tied to the same old branch of the same old tree in the same old woods. Sure, I’ve weathered many changes, but my viewpoint has always emanated from the same familiar place. Now’s the time to see the world from a new perspective. Shed the fear, the safety, the same old way of looking at things. See the world from high and low, far and wide. Get off the branch and . . . branch out!
With the festivities behind us, I’m now gathering height, altitude, and courage to venture forth beyond the confines of ignorance and bias—and the fear they engender. If I’m not to be a tamer, harvester, cruncher, analyst, processor, converter of Big Data—if I’m not to work aboard a fishing vessel or team of underwater researchers in those roiling seas—I’m at least aloft over the action. At least I can see the sea! Perched aboard the inland oak, I was growing old and brittle, curled and myopic, gripping the old, gnarly bark of the familiar branch.
All of which serves to inform the task at hand: resolutions for the coming New Year. Rest assured: to remember my roots and exercise my brain, one resolution will be to memorize Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”
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© 2019 by Eric Nilsson
