I’ve come full circle. Somewhere in my twenties, I read something that made me believe in manifest destiny. Over the past decade, a combination of jilted plans and fruitless wishful thinking — plus, perhaps, a measure of emotional maturity — changed that for me. The truth seemed to be that, as humans, we just don’t have much control over anything, ever. We are limited in every sense.
There’s the visible spectrum. The average seeing human eyes are sensitive to a very narrow band of frequencies within the enormous range of frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. But there are also other types of limitations to our vision — photoreceptivity, angular resolution, field of view.
There’s hearing range. The average hearing human ear can detect a limited range of sound frequency. We measure that in units we call Hertz, which is something some guy once came up with. Then there’s hearing threshold limitations, which refers to the pressure of sound and is measured in decibels.
Then there are the closely related senses of taste and smell, arguably the weakest of the human senses. Physicists have been challenged to objectively gauge the intensity of flavor and odor perception, and with that lack of an absolute unit of measurement, thresholds are difficult to determine.
The sense of touch is the most complex and different parts of the human body have different levels of sensitivity to everything from contact to temperature to itchiness to pressure. We know it has something to do with what we call “sensory neurons.” Nevertheless, its mechanisms are poorly understood.
Even the way we organize our environment with names and categories and units of measurement is conducted from within our limitations. The point is there’s a lot going on way outside the human range of perception and understanding. To believe that we can affect outcomes directly in the meaner of manifesting what we desire is therefore ridiculous.
And yet.
I have a friend named Heather. I met her about one year ago. She believes, at least to some extent, in manifest destiny. She believes that the state of a life is the result of the sum total of our actions and reactions over time. Actions include thought. Actions include speech. Actions include belief. Her belief in manifest destiny is one but not the only reason I am drawn to Heather.
A bigger reason is that, in spite of a life filled with many horrors, her heart is vaster than most. The trauma of her past — those emotional wounds that bulge and hurt — they’re her greatest beauties. They hold so much but somehow, through her eyes, they are not much to see. She’s transmuted that energy into gifts for the people she encounters; the people who naturally flock to her for help.
One day, Heather was helping me look for a bandana. I wanted one to cover my head for a Kundalini yoga class that I was about to attend and I’d forgotten to bring one with me from home. At the outset, I was in a bad mood. I wasn’t feeling well and I was struggling with some issue. We went from store to store looking for bandanas and one after another came up empty. I was hopeful about the dollar store because the first two stores recommended trying there. When we walked into the dollar store, rather than wastefully wander around looking, I asked the cashier, “do you have any bandanas?”
“Bandanas?”
“Yes, bandanas.”
“Yes, we have them.”
“You do?” I was so excited. I asked him where to find them. He scowled at me and didn’t answer. He was busy checking out a line of people. Heather and I walked the aisles, looked at every item for sale in the dollar store, and found no bandanas. We retraced our steps, certain they were somewhere. But no. I went back to the clerk and scowled at him.
“I can’t find the bandanas. Where are they?”
“Band-Aids?”
“Not Band-Aids. BAN. DAN. AS.”
He stared at me.
I said, “Handkerchiefs?”
“Oh, we don’t have those.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
I felt like a popped balloon. My hopes had been artificially inflated. The time wandering the aisles — tolerating the slight odor of urine mixed with body odor for far longer than I would have, far longer than was necessary, the futility of it all — was almost more than my foundation of bad mood could bear. Heather cheerfully escorted me out, reassuring me that Goodwill was just down the street and they would probably definitely have some bandanas.
“But won’t those be used? What if they have dried snot in them or something?”
“They won’t have dried snot.”
She giggled. I giggled. Meanwhile, we were discussing a recent and recurring dramatic situation in her life, which was making me feel useful, so in spite of myself, my bad mood was lifting.
Goodwill turned up no bandana. I gave up, but Heather didn’t. We walked back toward her place and kept looking in stores and not finding any. We stopped in one store where a woman was holding one of the most beautiful babies I’d ever seen. I cooed at him and he smiled a wet smile and reached for me, actually leaned toward me. I held my hands out tentatively then let them drop, seeing that the woman was not about to hand her baby to a stranger. But he cooed back at me and kept smiling. Easily, I smiled too. I walked out feeling happy. On a whim, when we were almost back to her house, Heather steered us into a sporting goods store.
They had them, but seemed to have run out, and they recommended trying the hardware store. That meant backtracking, which we did, and the hardware store failed also. Heather wanted to try one last place, a natural foods store. It was next to the hardware store so I went, again void of any hope. They didn’t have bandanas, but they did have these headband-like things that sort of mimicked bandanas when tied over one’s head. They were in a small section against the wall devoted to designer yoga gear. I tried on a few, didn’t really like any of them, but was prepared to get one anyway because it would serve the purpose. There was a woman nearby who was folding shirts. She’d been there all along, but we didn’t know she worked there. She was camouflaged in street clothes and seemed to have been shopping, herself. She offered to find a mirror for me to aid in my choice of headbands, having witnessed my deliberation while looking at myself in my iPhone camera.
Heather said, “You wouldn’t happen to have a bandana, would you? We’ve been all over town trying to find a bandana but nobody sells them.
“You’re right, they’re hard to find. I have a blue one, but I used to sell them here in lots of colors.”
The way she said it made us both think that she meant she had a blue one for herself, at home. So we smiled and nodded.
“It’s too bad you don’t still sell them,” Heather said.
“I have this blue one,” she said and reached behind a curtain. Her hand emerged with a crisp, new, sky blue bandana.
I looked at Heather and she smiled. It was a knowing smile, as if she knew all along that this would happen. Because she did. My new bandana made my eyes look bluer, and that made me even happier.
Experiences like these and people like Heather have renewed my faith in something like manifest destiny. Not that I can create something out of thin air, but that I can have the innocence of mind to believe it’s there in the first place. Children don’t pat the floor to feel if the world is there and strong enough to hold them. And those island natives in that well-known parable who never saw the ships because they had no precedent, but of course they were there, all along. My analogies are weak but you get the point.
It’s about having the instinct and the insight to know when you know, to ask the right person at the right time in the right way for help, and to believe, to assume that what feels so strong is too real to be a dream. It exists. It is.
Sometimes, it just has to shift a little to surface.
It’s the desired object up the magician’s midnight sleeve. It’s the fine black thread you didn’t see until you blinked. It’s the fortune-teller’s guesses being whatever you believe. It’s the tipping of a flower toward the light.
Recent Comments