personal will

but have learned to ignore it

The morning started with a lot of clouds. Then startling colour about 0610.

People apparently credit me with arising at ridiculously early hours simply to photograph the sunrise while the truth is that I enjoy my coffee, reading, AND photographing the sunrise. I have long been at that age where women don’t sleep as much as they might like so it’s normal now, even two years after retiring. Plus, I have always been an early riser, dating back to the only precious moments in graduate school when my other three roommates were silent. Now that I think back, I am not sure I ever slept late because life was too exciting to miss.

After whining about rain, it is a superbly beautiful Annapolis day with no whispy or any other kind of clouds. We decided to walk about 0930 to assure we got out and because we weren’t either sure what our next task ought be.

Our daily constitutional takes us out of our community on to a short street emptying onto a road in Eastport that annoys me daily because people drive twice the posted speed limit. This street is a whopping four blocks long (Eastport is the smaller town afixed to Annapolis proper at the beginning of the twentieth century so it’s hardly a large metropolis), with a finger of Spa Creek forming the boundary on the western side and a 90 degree right hand turn on the east. Where DO these folks think they are going at 50 mph? Did I mention the two stop signs in he middle?

Anyway, the brief portion from our condominia to the thoroughfare is about a tenth of a mile, not wide enough for cars driving in opposite directions simultaneously. Sadly, we found the crushed body of a turtle as evidence that two cars and a turtle certainly cannot be on the road together.

I don’t know much about turtles but think they are extremely long-lived. I did not need Dr. Google to tell me it was not a child’s pet from a mall shop but fully grown and probably fifteen pounts. It could have been a family tortoise living long in a kitchen floor or some other portion of a home. Or, it could have been that rare Eastport ‘wildlife’ that occasionally includes foxes and once-in-a-while sighting of a rabbit. This turlte was dark green with red markings, even before the mess of its demise. It was so icky that each of us had to question what the smushed object had been.

One less creature living among us.

Turtles eat bugs, I suppose, along with providing other natural remedies and contributions to our eco-system. Tortoises’ (and their sea cousins, terrapins’) ability to live extended lives is a tribute to something, though in China this one probably would have ended in the pot for soup sooner or later as pets are a relatively quite new phenomenon for most Chinese. Anything consumable too often became the centerpiece for a good meal, even dogs and cats. China’s— as so many other nations’—history is littered with famine so one hasn’t always had much loyalty or respect to these creatures, defenseless against the clever predators on two legs with big rocks or baseball bats.

I am pretty sure a common four legged creature known as an automobile crushed this one. Its shell was intact but barely and the rest was …

We both stared at the corpse, commented about how rarely we see them these days, and I made a mental note to come back to clean up the creature. I am not one of these folks that believes animals are more important than humans (animals may have more common sense than humans these days but that is a matter we can debate) so I planned to move the corpse before putting it into a suitable resting place.

We walked through Eastport, crossed the Compromise Street bridge both ways, then returned to our narrow road. The turtle was gone, although one could see a bit of residual blood (did you know turtles have blood?) on the asphalt. As we walked the remaining steps home, I found myself looking along the side of the street to see whether someone merely moved the remains but did not see them at all.

It’s that act of cleaning up something upon which I focus. How often do we clean up detritus on a common road rather than waiting for someone else to do it? That sounds utterly blasé but I don’t think it is. For all of our talk, of which I am a decided participant, about Americans being self-absorbed, distrustful of others motives, and blah blah yadda yadda, we remain an amazing people—from big to small things. The simple act of cleaning up the carcass of a turtle left after its ending in the middle of a street on a Monday morning in May is an action that someone chose to do. That individual might have driven the relevant car or the individual simply had the free will to choose to remove an unsightly corpse. I have lived here for six years, seven in the neighbourhood, but never seen an example of the clean police forcing someone to spruce up (ironically, a rather weed-driven ‘yard’ is the second house down from this poor erstwhile turtle).

Instead, someone took responsibility to do something about a minor but unappealing point on our local street. It was a choice, a personal decision to act: we are all endowed with personal will. Listening to common whines one might think not but we are endowed with free will on most things.

I have been exchanging views with one of the most thoughtful and loyal readers of this column after Saturday’s discussion of academic freedom. He reminded me, as I guess I did not make sufficiently clear though I certainly assumed such, that the protesting faculty at various institutions are making a choice resulting from their own will rather than something imposed a decision upon them.

He also sent me a completely different take on things this afternoon with a CNN reflection on why our national narrative is so negative. The stories we tell ourselves as individuals or as society—even a portion of society— clearly form the basis for our attitudes (duh). But, it hasn’t always been so: Walt Whitman was the poet with a far more hopeful tale for this country through the midst of our horrible civil war and beyond. The piece also reminds us Ronald Reagan was beloved because of his narrative of the nation, even as opponents questioned what he was describing.

Yet today we—ok, I—too often gravitate immediately to the most foreboding view. Sure, things can go that way but often they don’t. Yes, threats in all forms can affect us in pretty damaging ways but most often don’t.

I suspect for the current generations the 9/11 attacks with undermined of our sense of invulnerability, as if that were ever true, which led many to recast the narrative. But it was more than that. A substantial portion of the population seems to see apocalyptic issues at every turn which exacerbates anxiety and negativity only further. Religion, race, and basic distrust more are bred into the narratives we tell. No side trusts others and increasingly each side of the political spectrum seems to doubt even those with ‘like’ views. What is the nation these narratives are seeing, after all?

We have the choice to think, discuss, and debate according, leading to our decisions. Actions create consequences. But how often we do examine the stories we tell ourselves rather than attack the stories we think others are telling? We can do something beyond our personal advancement as the person did who cleaned up the carcass when we choose but do we do that? We aren’t necessarily going to turn someone else’s mindset except by example but we have choices because of personal will, but we can choose a different option from what increasingly seems a default.

We have power over ourselves, rarely really over others. We spend countless hours trying to persuade, deter, coerce, and other verbs to alter others’ views but how about our own, beginning with the stories we see.

Do we consider that often enough?

Thank you for reading this column. If you think it of value, please circulate it. I welcome and, as you can see, truly read what people send me, considering it whenever I get feedback. Thank those who subscribe.

I hope tomorrow brings you sunshine. Be safe and be well. FIN

John Blake, “‘Civil War' sends a message that’s more dangerous than the violence it depicts onscreen'“, cnn.com, 12 May 2024, retrieved at https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/12/us/civil-war-movie-democracy-blake-cec/index.html?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru