Impossibilities

A while back I had the most fun I've ever had in one afternoon. It wasn't the most beautiful afternoon, or the most memorable, or even the most relaxing – but it was the most fun I've ever had in the springtime in the sun.

I not even going to tell you what I did that afternoon. In a way, it would burst the bubble in your mind, make it feel like something you should replicate for yourself, a blueprint to go take somewhere and follow.

I will tell you this much: I played a pointless, made up, on-the-spot, impossible game with some of my favorite people. We discovered the game by trying to do something – it failed! Then we tried to do it again. We tried for hours. We were tired & sore & we couldn't stop laughing.

We never succeeded.

In some Keynesian utopia, we automate so many tedious parts of our lives that we live in economic abundance, only working – laundry, cooking, cleaning, educating, commuting, gardening – for its own pleasure. Sounds Star Fleet. Sounds pickleball. Automate our drudgery, relish our impossible games.

This "next Manifest Destiny" we reach for is instead automating our impossibilities: our writing, our gingerbread houses, our vacation plans, our emails, our wedding vows. We are left to drudge on, hotter and wetter, under the methane plumes and Flock cameras.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

– Wendell Berry, from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Impossibilities don't compute. They are, by definition, arbitrary & pointless. They are Art and Beauty – things never reached but always striven towards. They are gardens full of weeds always being weeded. They are paintings attempted again and again and again. They are photographs taken and left on a memory card, on the undeveloped film. They are not ideal. They are games we play, never expecting – or wanting – to win.