Zen Again...
"Mary Hartman's Back."
Perhaps I'm the only one who recalls the newspaper ads which ran some 20 years ago announcing the resurection of the show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The small ads simply showed a rear view picture of the actress's torso with the caption, "Mary Hartman's Back." I remember thinking at the time how clever it was. A nice play on words, simple and captivating, yet delivering a clear and concise message. Well, I still remember the ad despite the fact that I never actually saw an episode of the show. Still this might be a relevant anecdote since I was going to write about backs this week, and in thinking about clever things to say about backs, I recalled Mary Hartman. ...and off we go.
Backs are in the front (of my mind) lately as mine isn't working too very well. Perhaps that's harsh. I mean it's still performing its essential functions of keeping my head from getting awfully far from my butt, and it reliably informs my brain that my toes are still cold. However, I do dearly wish it would do it's job without so much complaining. But it really wasn't my intention to grouse here. Rather, bad backs got me to thinking about the connections of things, and how sometimes we become suddenly aware of the implications of a single point of failure in our highly connected world.
You see, the foot bone may be connected to the leg bone, the leg bone connected to the thigh bone, and so forth, but the back muscles are connected to damn near everything. My arms and legs are fine, yet they can't do much of anything as they are connected through my back. It really makes me wonder how Col. Steve Austin used to pick up cars and such. Six Million Dollars might have bought bionic legs and an arm, but Rudy Wells never mentioned anything about Steve's back.
But the concept of single points of failure goes way beyond backs into most every aspect of our lives. Who among us hasn't been caught off guard by a power failure as you go around the house and discover just how much of your life depends on electricity. Most of the hyped-up panic over the impending Y2K event is based on the idea that the critical systems which support the basics of food, power, money, and cable TV will collapse. These are points of failure which would have a domino effect taking out many other peripherally related systems resulting in people reduced to cooking simple food over a fire and reading and talking to their children in the evenings. We can't risk that.
More importantly, single points of failure also apply to our relationships to each other. A point we are seldom aware of until something tragic happens to someone. In all of our lives there are those few people whose loss would cause our worlds to collapse around us. They are our single points of failure. In engineering school we were taught to either build in redundancy, design such that the failure of the point was no longer catastrophic, or protect the point from failure by designing in safeguards. These can be good strategies in our interpersonal lives as well, although my wife rather frowns on the redundancy strategy where she is concerned.
But the most important step is to first identify the points. You can't fix what you can't find. What or who in your life is central and must be protected and preserved above all else? You see, you can't save it all. Life is full of interesting compromises. An even more interesting question is where do you fit in this? Is there something or someone who is so critical to the world in which you live that you'd sacrifice yourself or a part of yourself to assure your world's survival?
You see, about the only heavy things I can handle right now
are questions like these. Perhaps the pain in my back is just
a periodic reality check reminding me that comfort is not a single
point of failure in my life. It slows me down physically, but
my world remains intact. Life is good. It beats the
alternative.
