The View from a Drawbridge

Sometimes when I’m just waking, a phrase percolates up from my subconscious. Today it was “tilting at windmills”. What am I trying to tell myself? Am I, like Don Quixote, fighting a ridiculous battle? Am I getting unnecessarily agitated? Am I ignoring someone who is trying to talk sense into me? Maybe I should wear a brass basin on my head and go horseback riding in Spain.

Photocredit: Deeptruths.com

I don’t know. I did go to bed last night feeling really upset that despite all efforts, my life does not seem to be improving, so I’m sure that once I finally drifted off my subconscious got to chew on that topic for an extended period. I just wish that when I got a message from myself, it didn’t come in the form of a riddle. I’m more of a forthright kind of girl. Just give it to me straight.

In retrospect, I have had my fair share of Don Quixotes in life. For example, I have one friend who seems to think that legalizing marijuana will be the cure for all our ills. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s the most unhealthy person I’ve ever known and he smokes enough pot to fumigate the entire White House.

There’s another guy who stands by the side of the road in my neighborhood with a sign urging you to stop and get his report about how to reform the school board. He has been standing out there, day in and day out, for years. So one day I stopped and got his report. I figured it was the least I could do. It was about 50 pages long, and filled with so much gobbledygook that if there were some amazing insight in amongst the insanity, it would be lost on any reasonable person. I really wanted it to be an intelligent and thoughtful treatise. I really did. He has obviously invested a great deal of his life into it. But no. It’s bird cage liner at best.

It’s hard to get upset at Don Quixotes. You have to admire their persistence. And what if you convince them to give up their great crusades and move on with their lives only to discover that if they had fought the good fight for just one more day it would have made all the difference? You do hear stories about people who struggle long past the point where the rest of us would have quit, and in the end they succeed. I suspect that we Americans are fed those stories in our high chairs with our strained peas. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. NEVER give up? Never? At what cost?

I wish I had the answer. Maybe it will come to me in a dream.