Cheerleader for Hire?

Last night I completed my Torah Drawing (http://kenshinsbarmitzvah.blogspot.com/2014/10/parshat-bamidbar-4th-portion-numbers-31.html) and I showed it to my wife of 45 years.

I thought it was a good one. She said, “Looks like all your other drawings.”

“Oh crap,” I thought to myself. “I wanted a cheerleader and I got a wife.”

So this morning I told her that I couldn’t sleep because she didn’t like my drawing. “No,” she said, “It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, but only that it was like your others.”

As I heated up my second cup of coffee (I get 16 oz a day so I don’t OD), I was laughing about something I read Monday night: that in ancient Japan, people would buy fake enlightenment certificates. Maybe I should Google “fake certificate that this is the best drawing of your life.”

Or, “Cheerleader for Hire.”

I just wrote to my son-in-law that I took off my complaint bracelet last night and now am writing this complaint about my wife. Given enough time, we’ll complain about everything.

When people start meditating, they worry that they aren’t doing it right. And, of course, that worry becomes a great object for meditation. It is an opportunity how we take a perfectly peaceful and non-harmful act, and convert it into a painful experience.

When we say something, we don’t worry whether it is the best thing we ever said. We know that sometimes we’ll hit the mark, and sometimes we don’t.

Is our goal really just to hit the mark? And would we quit if we really did hit the mark? Did Duchamp quit art and only play chess because he had no more to say as an artist? (Actually I think it was recently discovered that he did continue, but stopped showing.)

Art students complain when they graduate that they have no audience for their art. I feel blessed to be living in an age when I have so many outlets. And I get a sense sometimes that I’m touching someone. What more could someone ask for?

In the meantime, I feel like I’m a greyhound running after a hare that is just a few inches from my nose. That is the game. Catching the hare would be a grave disappointment. It probably is the same hare that’s been used all season and is full of maggots.