He Can Be Taught

Many of us were taught while growing up that if you're carrying a sharp object and you drop it, let it fall. It's great practical advice, you know.

Among the accessories available (I adore alliteration) for the drain snakes I sell are retrieving tools. They are sharp and typically pointed objects. They have to be, so that they may puncture and burrow into a blockage in a drain and retrieve it. 

A year or so back I was carrying not one but two of them into a customer's office. And I dropped both. And I tried to catch them. 

It was like a juggling act which had gone off the rails. There I was trying to corral those two retrievers, each bouncing off my hands one to the other, and each time digging a barb into my palms. "Oh, ah, oh, ow," I repeated many times over trying desperately to grab them. Of course, they ended up hitting the floor anyway.

Why I had two handkerchiefs I don't know (usually only having one) but it was fortunate that day. I had to wrap them around my hands driving home, hoping the bleeding would stop by the time I got there. Tiny puncture wounds take awhile to seal.

The moral of the story, in case you - as I - didn't get the lesson originally: if you drop a sharp object, let it fall.

No Real Help

I don't mind assisting people. I really don't. If you need help, I will aid you if I can. But holding your hand is a whole 'nuther story.

Awhile back, a customer called for advice. That's cool; perfectly fine. Indeed it's part of the job, and I readily accept it on that level. Shoot. Tell me how I can help.

He described the problem exactly; indeed his diagnosis was spot on. I told him what he needed and that I could sent it right out. He offered thanks, but explained that he had the part I described, knew its application and that it could be used to solve the issue he had (which, I remind you, he understood thoroughly). He simply wanted to make sure how to employ the tool before he tried it.

Oh-kay. You understood the issue. You had the part which you knew would address it, and fully comprehended how to employ it. But you called me to be even more certain. 

Why not? I have nothing else to do. Take five minutes of my time. Ask my advice when you are already 100% sure of the answer. Don't think twice about it.

Of course I did not express such sentiments to the man. That doesn't mean I can't think them.

Old Knowledge

You're never too old to learn, right? And you're never too old to learn from someone older than you either. Whether you actually want to learn some of their wisdom is another question.

When talking to a friend who is about 20 years older than me, he was explaining why older folks have more trouble with bronchial issues. "The older you get, the weaker your chest muscles become. It becomes harder and harder to expel mucus."

Well, that's another thing to look forward to I suppose. The anticipation is killing me.

The Realization

While logging into my AOL account yesterday I saw an article which proudly offered an easier way for seniors to trim their toenails. I clicked on the link, thinking, oh, I should check that out. It might be useful.

And this is what my life has become. 

Heavy sigh.

If you don't know what you want

The other day I walked into a party store because I had thought I wanted a snack. But then the strangest thing happened.

The potato chips in all their myriad flavors did not appeal to me. The candy bars in all their grandeur, well, they did not appeal to me that day. Nor did the hard candies or the gummies or even the chewing gums. I began to look over the beef jerky and other meat and cheese snacks and lo, I didn't really have a taste for any of them either. And that's when I remembered one of me Grandpa Joe's standards.

"If you don't know what you want, you don't want nuthin'." I actually heard his voice saying it as I thought it.

It struck me that is a great truth in that. So I made exit from the store and was quickly back on the road.

My brother's wisdom

My brother had said some things which are worth hearing. Of course, he's said a lot things which aren't worth a tinker's dam either, but I'll leave that go. For now.

When someone does something so asinine as to defy even the most rudimentary logic he asks, "In what universe did he imagine that would be right?" Yet perhaps his best lament is when a customer brings an off the wall, second or even third rate drain snake into our shop and expects us to make it top of the line. "He wants us to make a Cadillac out of a Yugo," Phil will opine.

I can't think of another example just now. But you get the point: some times my brother is wise. Or a wise guy, take your pick.

Hutchins wisdom

Me Grandpa Hutchins, he was I think a wise man. In fact, he offered me one of the best pieces of wisdom anyone has ever offered me.

When faced with a bunch of chores you really don't want to do, do the toughest one first.

I believe he's absolutely right about that. I've found that it makes work easier in the long run. It's almost as though once you have that toughest task out of the way, then do the next toughest, you build a moment that gets work done more quickly. You begin (at least in my experience) to almost look forward to the next chore. And each task does, I really believe, in fact become easier.

Hutchins wisdom. Try it when you're up against the wall. It will help, I guarantee it.

Experience and wisdom

So, last Friday I was replacing a light fixture in our upstairs hallway. Easy peasy, right? Only the ends of the electrical wires feeding into the fixture were badly frayed. So I thought I ought to peel them back a bit.
All went well until I was trying to shave off about a half-inch of insulation from each side of the power cord. I had just thought silently to tell myself that the knife I was using was sharp and that I should be careful. But Hell, I'll be done in a second, right?
I was done in a second. Done enough for my knife to slip and cut every bit of a quarter inch deep into the pointing finger of my left hand.
It hurt and it bled. Luckily I was five feet away from the basin in our upstairs bathroom. I jumped into it and ran my bleeding finger, bleeding like a stuck hog as the saying goes, under hot water for several minutes. Then I applied pressure, fixed gauze and white tape, and stopped the blood flow. I then finished the job.
A few minutes later I was explaining to my daughter the lesson I'd learned: cut away from yourself. I added, "Experience is when you learn from your mistakes. Wisdom is when you learn from the mistakes of others."
My darling daughter only smiled and said, "You just learned from experience. I just learned from wisdom."
Well, what could I say?

He had a way with words

I loved me Grandpa Joe. He had wisdom, he did, and he had humor too. He had a sense of self which belied description.

He was literate, he truly was. He had a way about him. You understood him. If you paid attention.

If you was unloading a truck with a hoist, when the load was secured, you would raise her down. Raise her down, I tell ya. That's how you done it.

Raise her down. I'll not forget that phrase. You want something on the ground, you raise her down.

Ah, me Grandpa Joe. He had a way with words, he did. And a special kind of wisdom. He had that too.

The truth is out there

And looking out on high I saw Aristotle, the Master of Those Who Know, ringed by the great souls of philosophy.
-Dante, The Inferno

The exact translation of the line I paraphrase above seems in some dispute; what Dante is saying precisely is beyond my poor academic powers to determine. But the gist is reasonably accurate: the poet was speaking of Aristotle, and Aristotle was being commended for seeking and holding and teaching real knowledge.

Not, of course, that Aristotle's knowledge was perfect; no one's is. The overriding point is that we can know; we can hold a real knowledge of and appreciation for persons, things, and events.

Many thinkers today do not accept this preposition. My professors of education (I will not call them teachers) were very open in that they did not believe that there were any things true for all time and all places. In that light, should we be surprised that so many schools do such a poor job of education?

Questions of religion are tossed off as little more than personally interpretive systems which, at best, only help individuals cope with the traumas of this world. Could this be a reason that reverence for anything beyond the person involved has paled lately?

In politics, issues are little more than vague platitudes which help people get elected. Perhaps that is why men and women of depth and understanding eschew elective offices, for they understand that real things are at stake and are too busy actually dealing with them in real time?

Moral virtue is now all too often seen as a myth; should we wonder why there is so little respect for people and institutions?

All of this and far greater errors are based on the idea that we cannot really know anything. The fact is, if that false axiom should prove right, if there is no universal knowledge which we can all, if we wish, understand, then there is no meaning in the world or to life.

Do not fear. That cannot be the case. Aristotle and all the dead white guys, and a great many others of varying races and creeds (for truth is eternal and thus widely recognized across cultures and peoples) have shown us that we can know. Forget the liberal academics who have no respect for that tenet; it shows only their ignorance. Ignore the science trumps religion tribes; they will not accept that knowledge has different tests in different areas. In science, the test of truth is empirical. In philosophy, the test is Reason. With Theology, the standard of evidence is Faith. In the end, all knowledge compliments itself across these three major branches of her, that goddess we call Wisdom.

We can know. Therefore we can act. We can act for the greater good of ourselves and our world. We can do what we must with the clarity that truth is with us, that it dwells among us and at all levels. In the end, that is why we will win and the secular elements across the spectrum will lose. We have something to stand on. They have a bedrock of air.