Over time, I have noticed that the most popular post I have on my blog site is my Home page “Who is Dr. John Persico Jr.?” I realize that most readers want to know my credentials to see if anything I am going to say has any credibility. Am I someone you can trust? Can you depend upon my words or my facts? Am I just another wannabe Guru so full of my own opinions that I have no room for other points of view?
Upon re-thinking my Home page, I realized that it really does not do justice to describe who I am. It does not answer the questions that I raised above. In fact, if you take it at face value, it could be very dangerous for you. It could lead you to paradoxes and quandaries which are unsettling. It might lead you “circulus in probando” down a path that flows around until it comes right back to where it started.
A discussion with a friend the other day led me to realize that I am a very inconsistent man. Sometimes I say one thing, but then I change my mind. I am a very erratic person. Sometimes, I am very logical and at other times I am very illogical. Many of the ideas competing in my mind are incompatible. In fact, not only are they incompatible, but they are genuinely irreconcilable. This creates an uncertain and unpredictable me. If you are looking for consistency, if you want certainty in an uncertain world, I do not have much of it to give to you. I am capricious and arbitrary.
I am changeable and often at odds with my own beliefs. My life is discordant. Many of my friends would say discrepant. I subscribe to the motto that, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I prefer the incongruous and incoherent. The fickle and dissonant are the music of my life. Boring is living with certainty and sameness. God, please surround me with temperamental unstable mercurial and out of step people. James Bond said that “Boredom” is the worst curse of all. What could be more boring than a life whose patterns show no variability? Only sameness. All White motifs. No mosaics struggling with each other for our attention.
I have a friend who wants to be called at definite hours and with a pattern of hours that are predictable. “Let’s set a time to talk each day.” “No, No, I am a serendipitous caller. Let fortuosity guide our conversations.” The unforeseen and the unpredictable make life more interesting. Do we want to be rats on a treadmill? Sometimes, I walk by a health club and ten people are all sitting on exercycles facing the window and pedaling furiously to go nowhere. In my mind, I make faces at them and tell them, “Get a real bike and go ride in the traffic.”
It is these same people who say “I don’t like fish. They taste too fishy.” I try not to reply “Do you also dislike mollusks, cephalopods and crustaceans or is it just members of the Gadidae family that you don’t like?”
Those who march to the proverbial beat of a different drummer live with risk, but they also are not bored. We only experience life when we are open to the unknown and the unpredictable. Walk through a cemetery at midnight. Take a train or bus to someplace you have never been before. Read a book in a new genre. Watch a movie that is offbeat. Try some foods that you think you might not like. Meet some new people. Embrace the strange and esoteric. Life is not a cherry; it is a seething caldron of uncertainty and innumerable possibilities. You will never truly live if you simply stand at the edge of the caldron and wait for it to stop bubbling.
God save me from consistency, constancy, periodicity, routine, steadiness, regularity, and invariability. Give me a life with syncopation.
Aging Capriciously 