1 post tagged “dinosaurs”

I grab my computer. Before I place it in my backpack, I hesitate. Here, at this moment, I have to opportunity to change the future. At least this is what I think.

As a child, whenever I would do something that in my mind was catastrophic, afterwards I would fret on that critical moment when I could have changed things. Once I knocked over this strange multicolored glass bowl my mother used as a decoration in our living room while playing with my dinosaurs. When that flea market trinket shattered on the floor, my mother’s anger reverberated through the house leaving me in tears. After offering her all the money I had in the world, $20, I lamented the moment I decided the dinosaurs were going to climb that icy mountain - otherwise known as the end table. She refused the twenty, and in hindsight it was less about a $5 dollar piece of glass as much as living in a house with essentially four boys, my father included. At the time, though, it was practically a natural disaster of epic proportions.

So as an adult I occasionally have moments where I reverse the process. I picture a disaster such as my computer shattering into bits on the pavement, the result of an accident on my morning commute, before actually venturing out. A strong urge to set the laptop back on my desk wells up from inside me - a mechanism of self preservation - even as I reassure myself that there’s plenty of padding, that more than likely I’ll fall face first, that a computer is something that can be replaced.

I shuffle the pack to make room for the computer. I place it in. This little laptop is a big part of my life, and its destruction would be a huge handicap to my sense of well being. It’s not hard to understand how that is. As a tool for being connected to various social circles, experiencing culture, and expressing myself, this little piece of consumer electronics is an extension of my self image - a valid psychological concept, so it’s destruction is understandable dramatic.

But my self image has faced many epic disasters lately. With the laundry list of defects in my physical appearance, personality, etc. that my ex-wife assured me were the reasons she was leaving me and with the absence of my children every other week, I’m left to reconstruct a sense of self out of the rubble left by divorce. And in the middle of cinder blocks that made up the foundation of who I was and the framing that defined me, I realize life is full of decisions and consequences.

But the choices and paths that lead to this end I don’t fret about. In other words, if at the age of 21 I where to look at the events in my life of that year and think in reverse as I did with the computer this morning, I would still proceed forward. I would do it all again.

I grab the bike by the handle bars and risk all that the laptop represents for the thrill of living because after all, human beings are obnoxiously resilient creatures, and I have a very adaptable personality.