Points To Make

From Menletter May 2009

By Tim Baehr

Point of View

Gladys stood at the kitchen window. "Look, Hank! There's a huge wolf in the back yard! Do something! He looks really dangerous!"

Hank took the binoculars from her and looked through the other end. "Hell, Gladys, that's just a puppy. Teeny thing wouldn't hurt a flea."

They argued for half an hour, snatching the binoculars from each other. She always looked through the small end. He always looked through the big end.

The doorbell rang. It was their neighbor, Ned. "Hey, folks, how do you like my new dog? Got 'im from a rescue shelter - a beautiful five-year-old German Shepherd. He's out in my yard right now. Have a look."

Gladys began to raise the binoculars. "You won't need 'em," Ned said. "Just look."

Gladys and Hank looked, without the binoculars. "Well geez, I guess it's just a dog after all," said Hank. "Yeah," said Gladys, setting the binoculars down.

How many of us see the events and challenges of our lives through one end or another of a set of psychic binoculars? Which end do we look through? Sometimes it depends on our background and experience. Sometimes men and women react differently. The stereotype is that women tend to think of challenges, especially when their kids are involved, as more dire and urgent than their male counterparts.

Kid's sick? Rush her to the hospital! / I'll wait awhile and see if she worsens. Job's in danger? We'll be living on the street and eating out of dumpsters! / Let's send out a few resumes and wait to see how big the layoff is.

A problem arises when two people, usually spouses or partners, see things differently, as if we're seeing the same thing from opposite ends of the binoculars. One magnifies the problem; the other minimizes it. What we don't usually appreciate is that we're both using the same distortion device (albeit from different sides) to look at exactly the same thing. We need someone like Ned the Neighbor to tell us to put the binoculars down. At the very least, we need to realize that ours is not the only point of view.

What's the Point?

A buddy of mine, in his early seventies, teaches and takes courses in the local Senior College. He spends endless hours preparing the classes he teaches. And one day he asked, "What is the point of all this?" I said, "You mean why learn all this new stuff that we won't have a lot of time to use?" "Exactly. But I'm not going to stop."

What is the point of putting a lot of effort into something that, objectively, will bear little fruit? I'm reminded of my wife's 90-plus-year-old aunt, who would call with a question on some matter of medicine or physiology (she was a retired pediatrician): "Annie, how does people's hair turn white?" Eva, virtually blind and not facile with computers, kept wanting to know new things practically until her death at 96. Ann or I would dutifully follow dozens of links in a Google search, trying to ferret out the answer. "Annie, I know about melanin loss. That's the what. I want to know how!"

What was the point? Eva wasn't going to teach a class, or even pass on new information to her fellow residents in the senior housing complex. She just wanted to know things, and she didn't care about utility.

When you get right down to it, a lot of what we do is objectively pointless. I can guarantee that nobody reading this will be alive a hundred years from now. We will have done some important things, like teaching and raising the next generation to keep our society going. A few of us may even invent things or change national policy or discover a cure for cancer. Most of us, however, will just plug along from day to day. Why should we put any effort into learning new stuff, especially as we get into our later decades?

I think the answer lies in how and who we want to be right now - not in the past, and not in the future. If we realize that each moment of our existence is born, lives, and dies in an instant, then why not make each moment count? Anything we do to enhance our lives, anything that links us to unlimited possibility, is worth whatever effort we want to make.

Point of No Return

We men are supposed to be unwilling to make commitments. The problem, if it is one, may be broader: both men and women are delaying marriage and child-bearing. Even those in marriages seem to be ending them more often; about half of today's marriages end in divorce. Job-hopping is even more common than spouse-hopping: it seems that both workers and their companies are not making strong commitments to each other.

A commitment is a scary thing. It's like crossing a huge lake in a rowboat. Once you get half-way, there's no sense in turning back, especially if you're tired. You're at the point of no return. Figuratively, I think a lot of us get toward the middle of the lake and turn back, not sure we can make it to the far shore, and perhaps not sure what we'll find there. And in a rowboat, you're always looking back toward where you're from, not where you're going. And when you turn back, the future recedes until it's out of sight.

One of the problems in traveling backwards through life like a row-boater is that we tend to become committed by backing into things. "I don't know how I got into that great/lousy job/marriage. I guess I just backed into it."

The point of no return limits our options. This is true if we're rowing a boat, as above, or flying a plane and have gone beyond the halfway point in terms of fuel consumption. We must go ahead, or at least we can't go back to where we started. It feels like there is no escape - and that feeling is what makes us shy away from commitment. Better to turn back before it's too late. We don't want to miss the comfort of the known.

But what are we missing by not going beyond the point of no return? What adventures? What loves? What riches?