03.31.08 | Everyday Zen
We’re sitting on a sofa, a chair or anywhere. It’s somewhere between eighty degrees and one hundred eight, and beads of sweat appear on my various bodily surfaces. Your toes are wedged beneath my thigh, and they are freezing. I don’t mean this as a figure of speech. Your toes actually maintain a temperature below zero degrees Celsius, and due to some developmental phenomenon whereby your extremities possess their own abnormal specific heat they remain unaffected by external changes in temperature. In fact, your toe-sickles may hold the key to combating global warming; but I digress. It’s nice to feel useful, after all.
I like to think of myself as a Swiss Army Knife, not in the sense that I can do lots of different things, adapt to any situation or perform reliably under pressure, but that I occasionally lend someone a fish scaler. It’s the small deeds done on a daily basis that add up to satisfaction and the feeling of having made someone’s day a little better.
Every morning I wake up at a quarter to six and drive off to work. There’s an old man that operates a taxidermy business from his shed that I pass along the way. Every morning he’s out there mounting or stuffing a different animal, and every morning we wave to one another. I don’t know the guy, and I assume he doesn’t actually know me either, but we wave nonetheless. I like to think it raises both our spirits. Even more than that, I take his gesture as a sort of unspoken motivation. Seize this day young man. Mount it, or I’ll mount you.
At work I solve technological problems. Sometimes there’s no answer, but there’s always a solution. So when someone comes to me with existential lamentations or questions that seem to have no answer, I smile confidently and quote Bob Marley: “Every little thing is gonna be alright.” I probably don’t have the answer, but with six billion people on the planet somebody’s got a solution.
School. That’s the setup and the punchline. I walk through the halls of academia wondering why I’m here and in the same breath answering myself, never the same answer. Yesterday I was here to learn. Today I’m here for a spinach and feta pretzel from the bookstore; and tomorrow I have nothing better to do. With any luck someone will have a question I can answer or a dropped pencil I can pick up.
By the end of the night we’re once again lounging in our usual position; but tonight my toes are cold. Despite the fact that the lights, computers, and television keep the room hot enough to melt the balls off a brass monkey, my sub-zero appendages have found their familiar refuge under your thigh. Maybe this is how the world works. People help one another by whatever means they can. It’s cold out there. Sometimes you just have to put your toes on someone.