This past weekend I went hiking with some friends along the Point Reyes National Seashore (http://www.nps.gov/pore/). This web was suspended between the rails of a small wooden bridge over the fresh water stream that ran by our campsite. I took it the morning we were getting ready to pack out. You can see the morning fog that rolls in off of the Pacific had not yet burned off.
From the bridge back to where we left the cars was about a 5.5 mile hike. It was gentle slopes with good trails, so it wasn't a hard hike, but it was long enough that there were relatively few casual visitors hanging around our campground. When we hiked in we did so in the darkness with only our headlamps to light our way. This amplified the sense of heading into total isolation. We had a pretty rowdy night once we arrived, under the mistaken impression that we were completely alone. (Luckily our neighbor was understanding and joined us the next night for a few hours.)
A web is a thing mostly of empty space. In fact, even the most solid things are mostly of empty space when you regress far enough. Things that we hold to be certain are mostly just the result of determined efforts by the tiniest particles to stay in relation to each other, over empty distances that can only be considered proportionately impossible.
I was lucky to go on this hiking trip with a group of people that included two friends whom I have known since a time before I have memories. As a potted basil (see earlier post), there aren't many people I can say that about. These two friends' (who are brothers) mother babysat me when I was less than a year old and my parents and their father were going to the same college. Our lives weave in and out over almost four decades now and have taken very different paths. At this time we literally span the country, with one brother living near San Francisco, one in Minneapolis, and me of course near D.C. Despite differences and distances, we have managed to stay connected.
I was also lucky to go on the trip with three other people. One was the wife of one of the brothers, whom I have known for many years now and is also now an old friend. The second is a close friend of the brothers, and I had met several times over many years, but only spent casual time with. The third I had never met before, but was now the fiancé of the second brother. Each of these new friends is special to me, and I am glad to have had time to spend with them. After all if you add strands to a web, it just becomes a bigger, more complex web.
Over the last several weeks I have had something of a renaissance with old friends. I seem to have reconnected with so many people recently that I have felt at times almost overwhelmed. It's a good sort of overwhelming, though sometimes the emotions of reconnecting can be a bit swampy. One must tread lightly at risk of falling into unmarked holes. Not unlike hiking a new trail by the light of a headlamp. Or perhaps more like hiking along an old trail that you think you remember, but you can't be sure there hasn't been a washout or a slide since you were there last. Or perhaps the grass has just grown over a place that your feet once knew well.
If you take away one strand from a web, it probably is still a web. If you take away two, it is still probably a web. How many strands can you take away before you no longer have a web? I'm fairly certain there is no such thing as a web with no strands. One could hardly call a single strand a web. But two strands? Three strands?
I recently read a terrific article by two famous economists - George Stigler and Gary Becker - who were trying to explain why people seem to have a "taste" for certain things. One example they used was why some people have a taste for listening to music. Their argument, in a very simple form (and manipulated to fit my purposes…) is that we make investments in certain activities, like music appreciation by spending time learning about that activity. We might take a music appreciation class to learn about the evolution of German Romanticism for example. After having invested time in learning about German Romantic composers and what they were rebelling against, we would have a greater appreciation for what Wagner and Beethoven had actually accomplished. Presumably we would then get more joy from listening to their music. Stigler and Becker called this learning "musical capital". The more musical capital you accumulate, the more pleasure you got from listening to music. Unfortunately, the value of this musical capital depreciates with time, so it is necessary to constantly renew the stock in order to continue to maintain the same level of pleasure that was available before. Kandie and I learned a long time ago that this applies to marriage. Unfortunately it's an easy lesson to forget when the business of living gets going.
I remember sitting with my grandmother a year or so before she died trying to help her connect with an old friend by phone. She was very worried that perhaps this woman had passed away because she had not responded to my grandmother's letters. By this time my grandmother was quite hard of hearing. When the woman's husband finally picked up the phone, we had an odd four way conversation (my grandmother used a speaker phone because it was easier for her to hear) – me repeating and clarifying what the old man said for my grandmother, him speaking for his wife because she was unable to hear on the phone at all. When we hung up, she was sad, but satisfied. At least this connection was still there – so many others had been severed.
It takes some work to keep all the strands connected – against weather, random interference, and most powerfully time – and I have to constantly relearn that this maintenance should not be neglected. If friendships are the strands in our web, it is the richness of life that is captured and made solid in the seemingly empty spaces between them all.
P.S. – the Stigler and Becker article is called "De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum" and is in the The American Economic Review, Vol. 67, No. 2. (Mar., 1977), pp. 76-90.
P.P.S - the two great photos (other than the web) were taken by my friend Annette. Must give credit where credit is due.
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