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A conversation with my wife:
Sara: Marcus, come here (she is upstairs)
Marcus: I will be right there (I am solving the worlds problems, one at a time)
…I walk upstairs as she leave the loo and jumps into the bed…
Sara: I do not know anything!
Marcus: …. (quizzical look forms on my face)
Sara: …laughter…
Marcus: I am going to pee, by the time I am done you should have your thoughts straightened out
…intermission…
Sara: Sometimes I love that bewildered look I can put on your face
I forgot to post a picture of our newly painted living room wall; if you read Sara’s earlier blog about the paint lady, this is the paint we bought. Also she insisted we buy a gallon and now I have 3 quarts of paint, arrgh. I think we are going to get some white paint to lighten it up for the opposite wall. Anyway, here you go.
My wife picked up Into Thin Air after several years of prodding–I read it two times more before she finally gave in and started. Although I hike and occasionally scramble to high places, I have no illusion that I climb mountains or I am a climber; but I do know the feeling of irrational decision making. Krakauer explains the drive to climb tall mountains as an irrational act, in spite of all reason people feel driven to do it. Usually this drive has no connection to what other people think, despite the reckoning of most people; it springs from inside a person, a challenge that can only be satisfied by trying.
Many of my favorite memories stem from my ability to make irrational decisions: playing the heater game in 90 degree weather, hiking the Grand Canyon from rim to rim, asking Sara to marry me, taking time off from school to live with my dad for six months, sleeping on a football field in Ogden, Utah. This list could stretch much longer, but that is not the point. As an educator, I strive to make rational and logical decisions and I even look at decisions that do not follow some discernible logic as inferior decision making. This is wholey untrue, irrational does not equal crazy or stupid; there is a part of being a human being that goes beyond our ability to form a system to explain it. This is the land of the irrational where grace lives and the mystic speaks truth. By no means am I saying that our souls are a simple dichotomy where you either push the rational or irrational button, but that we are terribly complex and yielding to a human explanation–this is what rationality is, to the best of our ability, how things work–does a great disservice to ourselves. To live in the mystery allows us to grow and to feel God’s grace.
I am sure that I am not done pondering this; till next time…
