|
|
David Spates I learned some universal There's no substitute for reality, and the
best laid plans usually blow up in your face. I was reminded of these truisms last week
while I was on vacation, and anytime a vacation is able to prompt
universal truths from my consciousness it's been a great vacation. The wife and I were in Nag's Head, NC, last
week vacationing with friends, and it was there that I shuffled
across the sandy notions of reality and planning on the beachhead
of life. (It's a dippy metaphor, I know, but after a week of
sleeping late, lounging relentlessly and racking up towering
restaurant tabs up and down the Outer Banks, my mental faculties
are not operating with peak creativity. There's nothing like
crab legs and grilled wahoo to dull one's gray matter.) First, let me address the idea that there's
no substitute for reality. During my stay, I observed two remarkable
presentations of nature -- both of which I nearly ignored because
I had seen them so often in artificial settings. One was the brightly lit moon emerging from
dark clouds so slowly that the beam of light started as little
more than a pin hole but gradually developed into a celestial
spotlight that seemed to be striking only our oceanfront rental.
I have witnessed that sight in any number of movies and TV shows.
It's a fairly unoriginal camera shot that has been replayed for
decades, and now with computer-generated images a cinematographer
doesn't even need to set up his camera to catch it - he can just
punch it up on this laptop. The reality, however, is dramatically different.
What I saw wasn't atypical, but the fact that I was there to
see it with my own eyes made it special. Television, movie theaters,
the Internet and even books are a poor substitute for reality.
There are some things that you simply must experience for yourself. The vision of dolphins splashing a few feet
off shore was the other presentation of nature that reminded
me that there's no replacement for reality. Again, I've seen
pictures and read paragraphs about frolicking dolphins, but to
see it for yourself in a real-world setting with no third-party
filters at work makes all the difference. When I first saw the pod, I was unimpressed.
I've seen dolphins at Sea World do tricks and jumps a lot more
impressive that this, I thought. Upon further consideration,
however, I realized that what I was seeing was much more spectacular
than any staged Disneyfied showcase. These dolphins were playing
and jumping because they wanted to play and jump -- not because
it was the 3:30 show and there would be a plastic bucket of chum
waiting at the end of the performance. They were real dolphins
in a real situation acting naturally, and I was lucky enough
to be in the right place at the right time to see them. It was
something I never would have witnessed had I been surfing the
Internet, flipping through TV channels or reading printed words. So that takes care of my reality reminders.
The other truism is about the best laid plans. During my days
off, I came to re-realize that sometimes the best plan is to
have no plan at all. For someone like me doing the job that I
do, there is nothing more refreshing than to have no idea what
you're going to be doing in four minutes, four hours or four
days. The newspaper business is driven by deadlines,
deadlines and more deadlines. My working life is deadlines. The
only way you can make deadlines consistently is through planning.
If you don't know what needs to be done when, you can kiss your
deadline, among other things, good-bye. That's what made last
week so wonderfully relaxing -- I made a conscious decision not
to make any plans. I suppose there might be a philosophical contradiction in planning not to plan, but so be it. The beach is the place for metaphysical incongruities -- that and sand in your underwear. |