Childhood's End

I have been puzzling this past weekend, which in large part explains the dearth of posts on my blogs of recent.

Puzzling is meditation for me and is a way for me to sift through the pieces of my allegorical life as well as my physical, literal one. It gives me a moment of solitude, which to the outside world appears trifled and mere play. Child’s play. Real men don’t do puzzles. They watch sports and burp and fart in public, because they are real men.

A puzzle for me, and when I speak of puzzles I am now speaking of jigsaw puzzles, though I love nearly all kinds, makes one stop and see the trees for the forest, for in our big, modern world, we are so worried about not be able to see the forest for the trees. A turn of phrase often yields a turn of the view.

We are so busy trying to see the forest, that it is even easier to lose sight of the trees than vice versa, the condition of so much angst for some. I saw a big forest of people and things in India, but it served me of no use if I lost sight of the trees. Losing sight o the individual leaves one calloused to empathy and compassion. It’s easy to fell a swath of trees with one stroke if you do not know which ones are affected.

One of my favorite books is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which comes as no surprise to those who know me, but it is one that sticks with you, and teaches you likewise to become unstuck.

Quality.

That words haunts the book and the mental well-being of the author/narrator Robert Pirsig. It was a life struggle parlayed into fiction that he nearly lost his mind contemplating the dilemma of Quality.

A tree has Quality, a forest, Quantity. A puzzle has a picture, but the pieces are unique.

One of the CDs that I was listening to while puzzling was Pink Floyd’s “Obscured by the Clouds,” which in essence was a soundtrack for the underground film “The Valley.” Pink Floyd’s album, “The Dark Side of The Moon” is considered one of the perennial best albums ever made and expected to ever be made by many. It was when Roger Waters firmly took the helm of the band, leaving a bewildered in his own fog of confusion Syd Barrett to fade into blackened obscurity and delusion.

Waters in his own right is a musical genius, make no mistake. However, listening to “Obscured by the Clouds” again after several years, it was rather interesting. I listened to it without thinking of Pink Floyd post-Dark Side, but rather as a stand-alone CD in its own right. It was pretty amazing. I had always enjoyed it, but like one enjoys a light comedy after a hard week of work, not as a “serious” piece of Floyd, mind you.

All of that changed this weekend when I was listening to the CD, not as a piece of Pink Floyd, but just on its own, a tree that makes up the forest. As a stand-alone piece of Quality, not lost in the mass-produced Quantity.

Though we may feel that it is overly important to view the forest, the sun itself can be obscured by the clouds, but for want of trees, there is no forest, and for want of clouds, no reason to notice the absence of the sun.