If, in the course of human events [what’s highfalutin’ language for, after all?], one’s view is obstructed by a hill, there have come to be three options, each of which feature their own distinctive elements: summon the necessary wits and climb the hill – which will reward you with an unobstructed view (though some probability should be noted that you might not like what you see); summon the necessary wits and level the hill – which will reward you with an unobstructed view (though the hill will no longer be of any utility or refuge in the case of earlier-referred to sub-condition); decide to forgo knowledge of what lies beyond the hill and do nothing – an appealing option of certain though crudely sanguine utility that, itself, might overestimate the courage and wit required of option A.
What lays beyond the green? The rough, of course, and most likely a water hazard. If it’s a big-money tournament, and everything we do promises that it is, many spectators are on hand, occupying every bit of space just outside the area of play. The players? Ah, that’s where the analogy creaks.
Is this because we lose our sense of play when it comes to self-preservation? Certainly not. We seem to fiddle with the most trivial issues precisely at the most inopportune junctures. Is not the ability to dither in the face of demise a sign of a certain playfulness? If not, what then is it? A willful decision to ignore the hill and all that lies beyond it?
There is a solid divide between childish behavior and adult maturity that we have come to obscure and crowd out with nostalgia for the one and disdain for the other. The line itself respects this dynamic precisely as it allows a devious cross-pollination. Wherein, our affinity for innocence in the latter displaces our knack for creative response in the former. It does not have to be response to a crisis, but in the case that it is and we’ve replaced one with the other, we find ourselves having grown-up too quickly; adults, ill-prepared as children. We can’t hold our own hands after all. Oh… wait. Who’s is the hand of a child if not our own? Every other species understands this.
Climb or level the mountain and we have an unobstructed view to all the underlying issues at once. The spirituality, sensuality, economics, politics, ecology and thermodynamics of not putting more into the earth than we take out and not taking more out of the earth than we put in are… all the same thing. At once. Money times inexperience; envy multiplied by sustainability; Go X the Future… they all equal nothing worse than merely facing up to our own contradictions and failings. Then we can get on with the important stuff:
Making it up, making out, Sittin’ In A Tree. K-I-S-…