Fences

I don’t like rules and regulations; they’re fences containing me from coming and going.   I especially don’t like fences on basic little things.   I don’t mind them on big ticket items, like “you need bypass surgery” but constant guidance on minor things is annoying.  This is the Lawson Inverse Correlation of The Universe; the smaller the problem the more rules & warnings that only apply to a small group of people.  For instance, a curling iron has a bunch of warning labels telling you to use it only for curling the hair on your head (?)  You know for certain there is a lawsuit connected with each label, but the average person isn’t thinking along those lines.   Regardless, we need some fences to guide us through complicated times.  Our personal health is a prime example.  From the time we are born until the time we die we’re given broad health recommendations:  eat your peas and carrots, reduce salt intake, exercise, don’t smoke, don’t drink and drive, etc.  The funny thing is there are now so many quick fixes on staying healthy we ignore these basic suggestions until our health sours, then we’re forced into living around a diet of prescription drugs.   Think of your life as a large ranch with a few fences in it.  The key to a happy life is stay within the big fence but avoid having people create a lot of little fences for you.  That’s called a maze.

Growing up on an apple orchard we had a white wooden farm fence running  two hundred yards along the road in front of the house.  I hated the fence.  Every winter the snowplows knocked it out of wack then every summer my brothers and I fixed, painted, and mowed around the fence while our friends shouted to us from their cars on the way to the beach.  One of the best days of my life happened early one September morning when a drunk driver in a station wagon permanently wiped out the entire fence in three seconds flat.   The following 4th of July two drunks stole a station wagon, pin balled off the apple trees in the orchard, jumped a wall, and crashed into the neighbor’s picnic.  The fence was like a lot of rules; it was keeping drunk drivers in station wagons on the road at least for a 200 yards of Black Point Road, but no where else.

There are so many laws being written now to protect everyone’s health and happiness it’s confusing to figure out whether a lot of people will benefit or only a couple.  Regardless of well crafted language, nature finds a way to create health setbacks, including mental health.   I hate hearing about people who get ill from disease without a cause; like lung cancer from 2nd hand smoke or in my case Hodgkin’s Disease.  Years ago there weren’t any laws written that reversed my cancer; in fact it was the beginning of a large snow ball of other setbacks that came with it.  Nearly four decades later I am still here and happy to be so not because someone built fences for my benefit, but because I struggled against them on the way out of the maze.  And that has made all of the difference.  Slainte.