near misses , or (that's) "The Way It Goes"

Hurricane Irene skated by the coast of South Florida yesterday afternoon, and other than a handful of jackasses being knocked around by waves up the road at Boynton Inlet, the area has once more escaped damage. In fact, since I moved here a little less than five years ago, there have been no tropical weather related maladies, and I sometimes like to credit this fact to my mere presence.

(Yes, that is the sound of me removing my tongue from my cheek.)

Anyway, this year's August has thus far been defined by near misses. The week I left North Carolina, for example, Neko Case played not once, not twice, but three times within a three-hour radius of Boone. And tonight, while I'm lurking around like some curtain-bound cave-dweller, my yin, my brother, and his wife are going to see Gillian Welch at App State:

"That's the way that it goes..."

It isn't all sour grapes, though. Besides Irene missing us, earlier this week I narrowly avoided a head-on collision with past karma at one of my workplaces, and at the other school I was fortunate enough to receive a warning ticket instead of the real thing after inappropriately backing into a parking spot.

But poorly chosen automotive metaphors are beside the point.

The point is that yesterday one of my students spoke about the importance of timing when it comes to communication. It was an insightful observation, and this past week has done nothing so much as reinforce this idea. Often times we get so lost in the 'should and should not happens' that we forget we are ultimately not the ones in charge.

Time and timing follow a logic all their own, and the difficulties arise only when we begin to think that we could orchestrate it better. But the near misses are just as important, just as meaningful, just as rife with possibility as the times when things go exactly the way we want. Of all the qualities I've heart exhorted as virtuous, patience is undoubtedly the least contentious.

In fact, the ability to wait, easefully, for the right moment to present itself is the goal of all my metaphysical pursuits and interests. It is the reason I was meditating before 6am this morning, the reason I find myself living a life that seemed equally unlikely whether one chooses a time frame of 5 or 10 or 15 years. I accept and celebrate the time and Timing of these things; I do not covet God-Realization, Enlightenment, Nirvana, or Heaven.

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Coming full circle, Neko Case has some things to say about this as well:

"I have waited with a glacier's patience..."