Pain.... and Really No Gain

Pain is just the way a body says to the brain, "Don't do that again".  George Santayana is quoted as saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". I am sure you don't need a road map to tell how these two items might be related.  

After the elongated and seemingly endless winter we had, I finally took down the Christmas lights well after the time I usually do. In this case it was bordering on May. I say I took down the lights, because in most instances the lights have always taken me down. I have always had a complicated relationship when it comes to Christmas lights. I love having them up as they kind of chase away those early darkness blues that befalls us throughout the winter. To be honest, I am one of those people who have a tendency to leave lights up well after Christmas, just to have a little colour in the neighbourhood. 

Since the kids have moved out I have needed to reacquaint myself with a lot of the household chores, that parents usually assign to their kids. Chores like raking leaves, mowing the lawn, shoveling the driveway and yes, tackling the Christmas lights. This past year I was putting up the lights on a Friday night and against all the advice given to me by my wife, I decided this was a task that must be taken alone. My daughter Catherine was coming home the following day, but patience has never been a virtue with me, and apparently on that particular day, my math skills also abandoned me. 

 Mathematically, it should have been quite obvious; take a 12 foot high eavestrough, subtract a 5 foot step ladder and that leaves a 7 foot difference.  I am a shade under 5'10" which leaves a good stretch and then some to successfully put up lights.  

Even with that, things were going well. I moved along the front of the house in a steady and safe progression. Steady and safe that is, until I reached the corner of the house where there is a tangle of juniper mayhem. Still, on I forged with complete confidence. I guess if you were sitting inside the house, safe and warm and looking out upon the scene, disaster might have been easily forecasted, but when in the thick of things, the situation couldn't have been rosier. 

Granted, standing on the top step of a ladder that you are not supposed to stand on, and granted that balancing a step ladder over a tangle of branches might not have been the best of ideas. But I had that perfect balance between physics and falling; a yin and yang between success and failure. I was like a race car driver just on the edge of losing control. In hindsight and in my opinion, it was neither myself nor my physics that failed that night. It can only be attributed to an earthquake or one of those frost quakes we heard about all winter. The end result was my perfect balance was no longer perfect as the ladder and myself parted company.  

It wasn't the fall per se that did any damage, like the old saying goes, "it isn't the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop". I was near a tree so the boughs kind of cushioned/speared me as I went by. Once I had landed among the tangle of branches, I bounced back to my feet with the same aplomb as Inspector Clouseau. I did a quick check of body parts and all seemed functional. Except looking down at my gloved hand was like looking at an over-the-counter headache remedy commercial. I had little cartoon lightning bolts radiating away from my hand.  I was quite hesitant to pull my glove off, because something did not feel right and those little lightning bolts were a dead giveaway.  

I am unsure if it was morbid curiosity or a need for confirmation, but I did pull of my glove. There was no blood, no broken skin, but it was like what happen to Wile E. Coyote when hit on the head with a frying pan and he ends up with a frying pan shaped head. Somehow, and I don't know how, but somehow, on my way down, my finger got caught in the ladder and the top part of my finger, for the lack of a better medical term, got squished. 

I sheepishly made my way indoors, trying to hide this pancake shaped finger from what I knew would be a very long, "I told you so" session.  If that made it sound like I have been through this before with my wife, then the right message was passed along, if not please refer to the opening paragraph. 

After so many years of marriage and after almost an equal amount of injuries, there was not a lot of outpouring of concern or empathy from my wife; it was replaced with a much more practical, "What did you do now?" I answered in a meek tone that once again I was dancing with the devil and once again the devil won out. This did not elicit the sympathy I was hoping for. At first I thought of going to go to Emergency, but then just decided to ice it, take some ibuprofen and wait a few hours to see what would happen. No point overburdening the healthcare system, right?  Eventually, after a few weeks, the shape did return to my finger and a nice rosy pink hue became the norm instead of the blackish, bluish yellow colour.

As mentioned, my very practical wife instead of lecturing me and trying to teach an old dog new and safer tricks instead focused on doing something to prevent history from repeating itself, as I apparently lack this ability. She surprised me the other day with a convertible ladder. This is the type of ladder that can be used as a step ladder, an extension ladder, a saw horse and everything in between. It has more positions than the Kama Sutra and is just as difficult to master. But master it, I will and the next time I dance with the devil, I'll be leading... at least that's the plan.

Perceptions

A number of years ago I was chatting with the late Dr. Gerry Wagar, an old family friend and a professional colleague of both my father and brother.  The fact that he practiced medicine with both of them certainly pointed to not only his professional longevity, but also to his dedication and perseverance in the name of medicine. With so many years of psychiatric practice under his belt I always listened to what he had to say when it came to observations of the human condition. One day he mentioned to me that, in his opinion, the number one reason why relationships break down is not a lack of communication, but a difference of perception. His experience showed him that when one party had a different perception of the same event than their partner had witnessed and if they can’t resolve the difference in those perceptions that is when problems arose. This is what he felt was the root cause of most separations and divorces and it was this difference in perception that would then ultimately lead to a total breakdown in communication

A visual parallel to this are optical illusions in which our visual perceptions collide head on with reality. One of the most well known of these is that of a white chalice on a black background or is it a silhouette of two people looking at each other against a white background? It is pretty difficult to say who is right, when from each of the different perspectives; the image is exactly what they see. When looking at it this way, it is easy to understand how arguments can ensue.  It could also explain how an opinion can go through a 180 degree turn by gaining a new perspective on things.

That certainly explains that when two people observe the same thing, each may take away a completely different understanding of it and when they try to relate their perception to the other person, they often meet a stone wall as the other party may declare, sometimes too emphatically, that the other party is missing the whole point of the matter. This then would introduce the fact that the other party can’t see the nose on their faces, unable to see the trees for the forest and a whole raft of other idioms and personal slights and off we go to the races, finally resulting in the mother of all arguments. 

I have always tried to remember that bit of advice and made my best effort to see both sides of the coin, to alter my own perceptions and look at things differently. This has always helped me when writing, as trumpeting one side of a situation could be regarded more as propaganda than anything else. I am always reminded of how monumental some differences in perception can be when it was pointed out to me that the sinking of the Titanic could be seen as miracle to the lobsters in the galley of that ship.

The power of crafting what perceptions people have of events, products or in the case of politics, other people, is an all consuming task to some people. Advertisers spend billions of dollars to make us perceive their products are something useful and positive and at the other end of the spectrum, Machiavellian political backroom boys try to change the way we view their political opponents by running what seem to be a ceaseless parade of attack ads that strive to make their perceptions, our perceptions. Unfortunately, too often it works and this only reinforces their behavior.

First impressions, or the way that people first perceive you, can adversely colour your relationship with people you are trying to impress or can stand in the way of getting that job you always wanted or simply affect the way other people treat you. Often, even the way you perceive yourself can differ from the way others perceive you. When you project confidence others may see arrogance, shyness can be perceived as aloofness or a wild carefree attitude into being called crazy. Not that I can personally relate to any of those labels, but every time I start to think I might be a little crazy, I thank the Lord for reality television shows.  It just takes a few moments watching one of those that I seem to have my own reality check and I feel more than sane, more than normal and on a scale of zero to Honey Boo Boo, I think I come out on top.

But of course, that is just my perception.