Zig Zagging
Admittedly I have been more pensive of late given this stage of life I just entered into which some people have chosen to refer to as “empty nesting”. It’s still a little too early to label it that in my opinion as it’s not like my children won’t ever come back home. Jack has just begun the first of his four undergraduate years so I’ve got at least three full summers for sure with him and even though Katie is a senior and will graduate next May, there still is the distinct possibility that the now darkened room at the end of the hall has a role yet to play for her. This reflective state seems to have opened my crown chakra as I find myself trying to connect more of late through my writing. I’ve never been one to force it relying more on the ebb and flow of inspiration to dictate when it is time to transcribe these reflections down somewhere. The events of yesterday were one such catalyst that I must now yield myself to the siren’s call.
The day might have been fairly uneventful aside from the decision to clean out/reorganize the garage. The accumulation of mounds of stuff that somehow gets squirreled away into a space that is far too easy to ignore simply because we tend to spend minimal time in it beyond opening them when the need arises to free our vehicles for whatever purpose they are required to transport us. There eventually is a second encounter when we return from the knight’s errand and the same opening allows entry once again but this visit is typically equally as short since the primary function of this part of the dwelling is by its design to store things.
One could even say a garage is primarily intended to house the mode of transportation that makes our outings possible but there aren’t too many of them that I’ve seen that manage to stop there in terms of storage. At times, the vehicle carries more things back than it left with that were acquired while on the outing. Some of those items are destined to enter the more interior portions of our dwellings such as the gallon of milk we just bought which needs the confines of the refrigerator in the kitchen but there will be some items from time to time that will eventually consume some portion of the garage’s storage capacity. Little by little, these trips add up until a critical event of either trying to locate a specific item or trying to find a home for a newly acquired one brings with it the realization that things have gotten out of hand.
As I struggled to decide what to do with the complete home theater system that had anchored itself in it’s current garage storage location about seven years ago because I was sure I would need it some day, I heard the beginnings of a ruckus not very far away that I thought might have included a voice in distress. I emerged from my garage and shifted my gaze toward the direction that I thought the sound had originated and just as I achieved visual contact and began processing a series of moving shapes, all hell broke loose. I heard barking. Yelling. Crying. Snarling. A lady stumbles backwards and falls on her backside while another falls and hits her head on the asphalt. My first instinct was to run and see if I might somehow get in between the attacking dogs and the lady that was now sitting and crying on the ground. I was not alone as my neighbors had also sprung into action trying to achieve the very same goal. The complete picture was still foggy but I started to assess the situation. One lady was with her grandson walking her two dachshunds when they encountered another lady walking her two much larger dogs. One looked like a boxer and the other perhaps a pitbull mix. I myself have encountered both sets of dogs at other times while walking my own dog. It’s hard to know how dogs will react so I always try to maintain a tight leash on mine anytime an encounter happens and so far, I have been lucky.
I have no doubt a similar effort was made by both sets of owners but something about this encounter grew beyond what the lady holding the larger dogs could restrain and an attack ensued. When I entered the melee, I didn’t see a collar or leash on the boxer so my initial assumption was this dog had gotten loose and was the instigator in this incident. It was acting aggressive and continuing to lunge toward both the smaller dogs and the dachshund lady so I stepped in between this dog and them to help break up the fight. We needed to achieve separation at all costs to avoid more damage than had already been done. Between my neighbors and me, we were able to stop the fight but not before both of the smaller dogs had sustained injuries along with both owners. It was a hysterical and frightening scene.
I walked away still on an adrenaline high and found myself coming back to a couple of consistent thoughts: 1) What if that had been me walking my dog?; and 2) What about this particular encounter ultimately resulted in an altercation? I took a step back even further and expanded my thinking to ponder the implications for all encounters that we have in our life and how the right set of circumstances combined with the frequency of overlapping encounters are responsible for much of what unfolds in our lives. I have chosen to call this interactive mechanism zig zagging. I’ll elaborate what I mean by this.
Our lives progress in a linear fashion. At least from our individual perspective, this progression happens simultaneous to every other being’s independent forward progression as long as we coexist. There are a large number of people I will never encounter in my lifetime at all despite our coexistence. In fact, they will number into the billions. For those people, our linear paths are the equivalent of parallel lines that will simply never intersect. In reality though, there still is a parallel component to all coexisting paths even for those of the ones which we do actually encounter as no matter who we spend our time with or for how long concurrently, there are always moments of separation that create a unique timeline for each of us. These encounters then have us “zig zagging” back and forth between overlapping shared sections of our lifespans that periodically give way to independent ones that we experience individually. These overlaps might range from a single data point: a chance encounter on a subway that represents the only time you ever see this person in your entire life up to the deathbed of a spouse after a multi-decade marriage where even though a large percentage of that time might have been spent together, there were still constant zig zagging shifts between being apart and together for the couple.
I am sure the two ladies would have preferred that there paths not have crossed and zig zagged onto one other yesterday. Hindsight would have made one if not both of them turn around and walk a different way than the one which resulted in the confrontation; however, none of us ever have that luxury. Someone enters our lives and we don’t really know for sure what the extent of the shared timeline will ultimately represent. Will it be just this single event? A series of shared and separate events that occur with a varying degree of frequency but eventually come to an end? Will we make the effort to increase that frequency by reaching out to reconnect with someone after we part to add as many shared zig-zag segments as possible? What about those people we might think have zagged away from us for good but for one reason or another find their way back to us just like in the Pearl Jam song Elderly Woman Behind the Counter where Eddie Vedder exclaims ‘My God it’s been so long never dreamed you’d return‘?
There are also varying degrees of intensity to each zig zag. Technically speaking, I might attend a sporting event with thousands of people and have the common overlap of a particular game experience but the ones I actually go with and sit next to will have the strongest connection with me while I won’t even be aware of the overlap at all with those I don’t actually connect with directly. Perhaps we could meet somewhere else along the way and realize that we had this “connection” some time after the fact but it’s not quite the same as developing the shared memory literally together. It also might be something that developed when frequent zig zags happened as the result of intense day to day overlaps and interactions with classmates or colleagues that you spent a great deal of time with during one stage of your life only to see them fade away into their own individual paths once the common environment was no longer bringing you together. This is one of the reasons why I think we have high school reunions so that we can zig zag back into each other’s lives just long enough to catch up on what happened while you were away and to take a group picture before we part again.
My best friend happens to be from that same high school group I might have only seen at a reunion event now after years of frequent interactions but he and I decided it was worth the effort to zig zag back into each others lives with a high degree of frequency through either phone calls or trips to see one another so that we will have several overlaps while on this journey called life. I call this out because while we may not be able to avoid situations due to a lack of understanding what they will ultimately be through hindsight, I can guarantee you they won’t happen at all unless you make the effort. There is a chance element to zig zagging like the subway encounter I mentioned but I promise you the spouses holding hands at the very end had something to say about their zig zag.
