Fragments From Floyd

This life I'm living wasn't in my five-year plan. Certainly it wasn't in the overall life-goals mission statement I might have naively projected for myself in my twenties or thirties. I left teaching for many reasons, now whaddayaknow: I'm back in the classroom again. I stumbled on writing quite by accident, leading to the blog, the radio bits, the little newspaper column. I never set out to be a writer. At Hindman, I'll be among writers who ended up in that discipline and medium by design.

Or did they? Do any of us aim and hit the targets we think we're aiming for or are we all ad libbing our way from one happenstance to another with as much grace and seeming intention as possible? I think this parable (thanks, Melinama) pretty well describes it:

Once, a man dreamed of being the greatest archer who ever lived. He studied at the military academy in Moscow, learning to plant his feet and square his shoulders, to address the string with three fingers, to suspend his breath at the moment of release.

He became one with the target. Eventually he shot perfect bull's-eyes almost every time. He was traveling home from Moscow when he came upon a riveting sight: an enormous barn and on that barn a hundred targets. Some small, some big, some in the middle of the wall, some low, but in the center of every single target, an archer had shot a perfect bull's-eye.

Our archer marvelled: "I couldn't do that!" He asked a passing village to find the archer who had done it.

The villager came back shortly with a kid. "You did this?" the archer asked. "Uh-huh," replied the girl. "Can you teach me how?" "Uh-huh." And she showed him just how she liked to stand and hold the bow, and just how she pulled the string, and just how she held her breath at the moment of release.

And then she explained... "Just after your arrow hits the barn, take a bucket of paint, and paint a target all around it."

We'll see where this workshop lands on the barn. And afterwards, I'll have some more painting to do.