It’s always us old fogies that catch the flack for being set in our ways. You-can’t-teach-an-old-dog-new-tricks and all that hoopla. Well, I’ve got an old dog that learns “new tricks” all the time, and it is effortless how well he teaches me a few things along with him. It’s one of those things that I try to keep a sharp eye on, this thing of being a stuck-in-the-mud.
Sure, change is harder to roll with now that my bones are completely calcified in my half century of time on Earth. But even in my old age, it’s plain to see that change is a good thing, even if it doesn’t seem to be so at first. The thing is, once the clock ticks, things are changed anyway. So, there’s no sense in getting stuck. No sense at all.
If you think about it long enough, it seems silly. On the surface, it’s the path of least resistance. If you’re not stuck in the mud, so to speak, then the river of life doesn’t smack into you, push you hard, before it rolls off your staunch surface to flow right on by. OK, you’re standing strong, but that river of life just waves a fond farewell in retrospect as you fade away to a dot in the rearview mirror. Those fellow sticks stuck-in-the-muds standing right along with you will not hesitate to call you names like “liberal,” “fence sitter" or “weak” when you decide to break loose and go with the flow.
And that is the trap. The stuck-in-the-muds proclaim loudly, with a bit of logic to support their superficial arguments. It’s when those arguments become hard and fast, completely stuck in the mud of either hot or cold that they then become extreme. That extremism is what becomes the antithesis to life itself. Life cannot exist in extreme cold or extreme heat. It needs both; it needs the nutrients of the flow of the river. Life depends on nurturing warmth.
