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MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE
Friday May 1, 2015
What units do we use when we measure people?
Shoes and shirts come in sizes; lumber, in dimensions; phrases inspire superlatives.
People?
Isn’t about size or shape, isn’t breadth or depth of their life – or tallying their travels. Or is it? How we learn, understand, feel it – more about characteristics of their journey getting around earth – sense of adventure.
So imperceptibly different – I’m not sure any two people are remotely similar. It’s like distinguishing one species of ant from another.
Even under a microscope of interrogation, how can you tell?
Well, for starters, most bald ones are males …
I’ve re-joined searching/dating/exploration – wherein we seek someone to say, “I choose you”. Most of us want to wake up next to the same someone most mornings. Not necessarily every morning. Yet we want to feel that butterfly has freely landed on our shoulder rather than being net-captured.
Who do we notice?
Who do we miss entirely?
Who changes our direction, our perspective or purpose?
Roads have signs, lights and speed limits. Navigating people – all signs and signals are invisible, hidden beneath surface stories (thank goodness for Braille …)
I sailed away on an excursion last evening – like a slightly schizoid Joseph Konrad story with ports of call, music and fog-horns, onshore adventures, living life with no particular fixed address yet knowing where you are, who you are. Where you are going might be a different matter.
Is she for me, or not?
In fullness of time, will yesterday matter, will memories linger?
Journeying man, journeying woman – their craft, art, trade – is wrenching juice from life.
And then drinking it all in massive gulps.
Mark Kolke
P.S.: this column started as something else about something else about someone else. Belly-think often leads my brain where it needs to go, not instinct like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. More like Robert Frost’s ‘knowing how way leads onto way’.
column written/ published from Calgary, AB
morning walk: 2C/36F, easy walk, knee better – Gusta in a strange mood, snarly and didn’t want to give up a maggoty bird wing I had to wrench from her jaws (her thoughts of a snack, mine of some bird flying on one wing) as she was simply being true to her breed – retrieving something and not letting go, a characteristic that seems more ‘bulldog’ and golden …
Reader feedback
IS ANYONE THERE
Hi Mark, In my line of business I send emails & leave voice messages to clients requesting certain information. If I don't get a Read Receipt back I wonder if they received it or what. When I don't hear back from them or at lease get some acknowledgment I wonder if there is a big black hole out there where all the ignore goes. I find it frustrating as the work that I do can be time sensitive. I realize that we are all so very busy with the work that we do but it's ignorant on behalf of the recipient to not respond. I can only guess that some people do not put as much attention to things as I do, MC, Bottrel, AB
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