Columbus Day recently went by, largely unobserved. I think that’s too bad.
Uh oh. Where is this going?
Please, your honor, allow me a little leash to explain. Here we go – golf, Columbus, parenting, and space exploration.
Stan, a friend of mine, once returned to Chicago from a trip to LA. He was an excellent musician and playwright considering a move to the mecca of NYC or LA, as artists in Chicago are required to do by law. Upon his return, I asked what the verdict was. “We went to a dinner party in Santa Monica,” he started, “beautiful house, probably about 15 people. And, well, everyone showed up with nothing. Empty handed. Every one of them. They’d brought nothing to the party.” He paused before saying, “Pretty much when I decided I’m not moving there.”
Here we are – we modern moguls, evolved beings, digesters of data, proudly superior beneficiaries of the mistakes of yesteryear’s rubes. Yet we’re really still on the same page as Columbus and those of his time.
I’m thinking of space exploration. The populist conversation has moved to Mars colonization, Elon Musk, the feasibility of terraforming that planet, and fantastical exoplanet journeys, with other spin-off fantasies in its wake. (All that is another discussion.) I’m looking at what’s not there: Our spirituality and humanity. It is a Western habit to get all tingly when fusing science and spirituality – science verifying spirituality, and spirituality coloring science as inherently humanist. However, something’s missing: A hard look at both, and consideration of some dilemmic questions.
So, inspired by my friend, Stan, the question is this:
What are we bringing to the party?
I’m skeptical that Elon and his company, SpaceX, have reflected on the spiritual side of things. However, given Elon’s fearlessness to get high during podcasts, I figure he might be loose enough to be up for this question. And with his likely launch into a 5th marriage soon – and the quote that he’d “rather stick a fork in his hand than talk about his personal life” – there might be something in this for him to stick a fork in.
Our angle hasn’t really changed since Columbus. Essentially, we trumpet curiosity, exploration, and discovery as unassailable reasons to blindly stumble ahead at warp speed, with a shrug of ‘eh, can’t stop progress’ and a story that we’re bringing democracy, or Jesus, or some belief system to civilize the natives. To cross-reference, our foreign and military policy, as well as capitalism will get you the stink-eye if questioned. We invoke the buzznames of ‘progress’ and ‘exploration’. Unfortunately, we also bring ourselves – a fairly diseased and messy work-in-progress. In no shortage of irony, our unreflective embrace of action and the rigid belief in our systems of thought in their pure, untempered, and unchecked form play a major role in what’s trashed our planet to the point of a panicked search.
We’ve soiled this planet into dysfunction. So we’re basically on a noble quest to find another toilet. Instead of fixing the plumbing or consider another action for our waste, or to even stop producing waste, we opt to kill two birds by scratching our Manifest Destiny itch (now a rash) while also maintaining hope – however deluded or misguided – of our species’ survival. It’s as if the philosophical visionaries for space exploration were farmed from the idea-team that spawned the disposable diaper. We look elsewhere, where our imaginations can run free, unencumbered with the reality that we’ve been brilliantly adapted for this planet, and this planet only, not to mention that reaching any theoretically inhabitable exoplanet is roughly the equivalent of asking an insect to float on a leaf across the Pacific. On the other side of that, we observe the extinction of hundreds of species every year by our own hand, yet somehow thinking we’re immune.
It’s our nature to look outward for imagined solutions. The path of the adventurer is attractively observable, measurable, and dynamic, while the activities of introspection aren’t very observably active or measurable, and consequently, by our materialist and entertainment addicted sensibilities, static or non-existent. The transformational path sucks and hurts – we’ll do anydamnedthing to avoid that hellish misery.
That brings me to encourage a resurgence of Columbus Day. Let’s observe it. I may be one of 3 people in California who thinks this, but the other 2 are in favor of ‘celebrating’ it – that’s different. But it’s not your parents’ Columbus Day. This day would be a day of atonement. The revamped model would come with a requisite 360-degree discussion of who Columbus was, speculation of his and all players’ intentions and motivations, the mistakes, the benefits, and the downstream effect of his actions for better and worse.
This holiday would be new in that it’s an old idea. We’d revive our atrophied ability to have any national day of reflection, much less repentance. It’d be one day to reflect that our blessings quite possibly – if not probably – come at a cost to someone else. (I’m not a ‘zero-sum’ thinking guy – but in truth, it’s how our country has used its influence and power. Your $3/gallon gas isn’t because we’re blessed – it’s because someone, somewhere is paying the difference.) Christmas, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, et al have devolved into an orgy of nationalism, gluttony, re-written history, consumerism, and/or some secular vice-fest, away from anything soulfully reflective. Yep, I admit that I’m Scrooge, but the Scrooge after the spirits visit. To get everyone’s attention, the reborn Columbus Day could be the novel moment that it all non-denominationally shuts down. Quiet. Space. Reflection.
Various locations, starting with Berkeley, have superimposed Indigenous People’s Day (which should be given massive attention in its own right) over Columbus Day. But by doing that, we’re sidestepping the historical lessons of the Euro invasion of the Americas of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, and consequently the understanding of who we have been and are, at our core, still, to this day. The lineage extends back to the Crusades and further, as well as forward to the present. In other words, I think we can unfortunately assume that this holiday’s benefits would keep on giving. We need the reminder. Spiritually speaking, we can’t change what was, and as a result, what is, even if we think we can by refocusing or rewriting a version to supersede the current, popular story.
It wouldn’t be the worst thing to temper our urge to barge into someone’s planet or country with the same spirit as Columbus when the New World disrupted his cruise to Cathay. We’re like the uninvited dude looking for a ride to show up at the ICU staff Christmas party with the flu, while coughing and hacking up a lung, to ask for money from his girlfriend who works there. Essentially, Columbus. Still, I’ll give Chris some benefit of ignorance in a time where disease and evolution wasn’t understood, and there didn’t seem to be much conflict/resolution territory between manners and brutality. But now we have more information, history, and knowledge. Hopefully. If we stop and look at it.
You may be annoyed that I’m wearing my downer, slightly-ranty-grumpy man pants – I get it. After all, you wonder, what does any of this have to do with golf or parenting? Well, nothing and everything.
The connection, to me, isn’t a stretch. One of the long-game lessons I’m serving up to my 9 year-old is You get what you give. For this, golf is an amazing teacher. Give golf – or anything – your time, attention, and patience (and ideally your focus, soul, and heart), and it’ll be returned. It may happen immediately, it may take years. And it may be returned in ways exponential, unanticipated, beyond our scope, or in a form we don’t recognize. But it’s returned. The spiritual riddle and caveat is don’t expect anything back if you’re giving to get. Golf – as well as all people and things – can smell agenda from a hundred paces. There’s no faking and no hedging. It’s the equivalent of the ball goes in the hole or it doesn’t. Beautiful. Elegant. Absolute. Don’t show up to the game expecting a hand-out. Just give, purely.
I’m hoping, for Graham, it’s a question to consider for all things, whether golf, space exploration, finding a navigable trade route, or whatever.
What are we really bringing to the party?