A moment of clarity

The last time I experienced a moment when one of life’s uncertainties melted away, I’d been riding my bicycle. The route I prefer for the sake of exercise and safety stays on the pavement, avoids rush hour traffic and keeps me off any asphalt where posted speed limits approach the Medicare enrollment age.   

Recently, I considered upgrading to an e-bike, thinking that a lithium battery might be a more reliable container than my skull for more energy and inspiration. In the end, I decided to stick with my traditional foot-powered, coffee-charged, pedal-and-chain driven bicycle. For me, it makes more sense; the slower I go the more sensible I am.

Like every online package I order, this clarity business doesn’t show up when I push the purchase button. Often I am forced to abandon my quest in solving problems, walk away, and hope that in the future – if it’s truly important – the answers will arrive when I least expect them. 

And when they do, sometimes with such an immediacy, it’s baffling. I’ll sit up in bed in the middle of the night and mutter “the Battle of the Bulge!” then, fall back asleep. In the morning, Pam will ask if my seance with Eisenhower’s ghost went well. Then I’ll spend half the day wondering what she was talking about.  

Moments of clarity while awake can be less invasive but still quirky. An elderly friend who lived alone often needed a younger set of hands. While we worked together to repair her periodically dysfunctional irrigation system, she’d use a phrase that sounded to me like a foreign expression. She’d ask me to sit tight while she rummaged through her orderly supply of labeled boxes in her basement, looking for what she called a “gozinna” or a “gozonna.”  

When she’d return with the missing link, just by slowing her pronunciation down in my head, I understood what she actually said. She needed either a male connector that “goes-in-a” or its female counterpart that “goes-on-a” pipe fitting. That moment of daylight still makes me blush. 

Noted American inventor, architect and philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller – noted for popularizing the geodesic dome – confirmed my suspicion about exceeding the speed limit in his slim but innovative 1970 Bantam paperback, “I Seem to be a Verb.” It presents a miscellany of newsworthy (and outrageous) quotations and photographs culled like a time capsule from “Spaceship Earth’s” media. The book is actually two, divided along a continuous center line of thoughts – all CAPS – the top half of the book in black ink, the bottom in green, as if to suggest a contrast between industrial and ecological thought. The reader can start anywhere, or read just the top half, cover-to-cover, then flip it upside-down and read the other half. But it all begins with this memorable stanza:

“I live on earth at present,

and I don’t know what I am.

I know that I am not a category.

I am not a thing – a noun.

I seem to be a verb,

an evolutionary process –

an integral function of the universe.”

He’s right, that we are all verbs, but conjugating more rapidly than Darwin ever could have foreseen in his Galápagos Island observations. Our thoughts flit about like finches, impulsively changing each new idea so that it possesses a slightly different beak, highly adapted to a specific purpose, ready to pounce on the next opportunity.

Alvin Toffler, along with his spouse, Adelaide Farrell, also published an international bestseller in 1970 called “Future Shock,” a term the authors defined as “too much change in too short a period of time.” According to Wikipedia, “(Toffler) argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation.’” No wonder I sometimes find myself standing in the bicycle lane, scratching my helmet.

Max Roser, of the World Economic Forum in Oxford U.K., writes, “The technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age.” If there is a second edition of Toffler’s book, it ought to be titled “Economic Shock” – fueled not only by innovation but also by human avarice – a powerful driving force of high-speed change. 

I grappled with this concept even before reading my copy of the Buckminster Fuller book, which surfaced at a thrift store several months ago. I paid 25 cents. The original price listed on the cover? $1.65. My acquisition illustrates a modest but steady 55 years of deflation. Then I looked my book up on a second-hand sales site and found 115 other 1970 copies ranging from $70 to over $700. It’s still confusing, because both prices now exist simultaneously in my mind. 

It could be that true clarity requires more time than patience will ever allow.