I am a clumsy man.  I’ve been clumsy since I was a little kid and after twenty-five years of psychotherapy, I’m still clumsy.  I definitely figure that I will be clumsy ‘til the day I die.

I don’t mean that I can’t pound in a nail without smashing my fingers or drive a car.   But I do mean that I mostly stumble around this world.  And I suspect that I am not alone.

As a man who plays a sax,  I see others whose whole being does not seem to be at war with a steady rhythmic pattern the way mine is,  more so in reading and remembering than in hearing and adapting.  But this is a perennial battle in me, where my body rebels and twitches rather than going with the flow.   And as a clumsy man, trying to master rhythms by adding  clapping or foot tapping only seems to add insult to injury and injury to insult.

 

And yet we plod along.  We stumble, we get dirt on our shirt and we wipe it off and go on.  We shouldn’t “feel so all alone.”  We’re among friends, stumbling along with us.

 

Jon

(Father’s Day, 2012)