Thursday, August 7, 2008

XIV: In Which I Am Reminded of My Resemblance to a Boiled Frog

I've been cleaning up the house lately in preparation for putting it on the market. Sorting through seven years worth of accumulated junk is a formidable task, and one that is not without its occasional surprises. Yesterday, for instance, I found a photograph of me taken in September of last year. I was 20 pounds heavier than I am now, and I will not lie: I was big old tub of goo. What was shocking was not so much seeing myself so Sumo-esque but rather the realization that at that time I had convinced myself I wasn't as rotund as I actually was. I now recall dressing in ways that I thought masked my endomorphy and approaching mirrors from complimentary angles only and concocting all other sorts of strategies to maintain the fantasy that I wasn't a porker.

There's a paradigmatic science experiment that everyone, even science nitwits such as I, recalls. A frog is placed in temperate water. Then, the temperature of the water is increased gradually until it reaches a boil. The frog accommodates itself to the incremental increases and stays put until, ultimately, it is cooked. This is not only a nifty science experiment, but also the beginning of a fine French stock.

You no doubt see where I'm going with this. In retrospect, it's now clear to me that my marriage endured a slow steady decline during its final years, that it was over long before my future-ex and I headed off to counseling or attempted a trial separation or any of that. I reacted by accommodating the deterioration. I kept lowering my expectations and looking for signs of an oasis in the desert. I was a boiling frog. It seems pretty foolish in retrospect, but it made perfectly good sense at the time.

A more self-assured individual than I might at this point assert that he'd lost a lot more than 20 pounds over the last year; he'd lost the debilitating weight of self-delusion. Me, I'm not so sure. I am currently happy that I am no longer trying to convince myself that up is down or that black is white or that I wasn't a lardass last September or that my marriage was salvageable after it actually was, but I am also a golfer. I sense some head-scratching out there. Hear me out. Golf teaches you many things, but this is the big one: the lessons you believe you have learned from previous errors have an extraordinarily short lifespan, and you will soon have to learn them all over again. Just when you've finally figured out what is wrong with your weight distribution, your swing plane, your grip, your wrist hinge, the length of your backswing, etc. etc., one or more of them reverts to its former imperfection and you have to start learning the same old lessons as though from scratch. Ultimately you have a sequence of 'ah ha' moments out on the course. First, you realize that you have discovered the reason your golf game sucks. Then, you realize that you have had the same epiphany many, many times before and applied the same correction, only to return to the same old crappy swing. The moral: Most important lessons in life simply don't stick.

Perhaps in the end we are all Sisyphus, rolling that damn rock up the hill only to see it roll back down again. We all hope for enlightenment and serenity, but history produces precious few Buddhas. Most of us can only hope to be like Quixote, which is to say to be like Sisyphus, except delusional. At least then we can approach mirrors at particular angles that don't make us look so fat, or tell ourselves that our failed relationships aren't yet doomed, and take the illusion for reality. It's not optimal, but unless we're ready to clock some serious hours under the Bodhi tree, it's probably the best we can hope for.

So there you go.

No comments: