radar-screen lifestyle

Today, with an ever-so-delicate dusting of snow on the cars in the street and the sun bright and the air crisp, the house is empty. My wife and older son went to New Jersey to hook up with my daughter yesterday and ... there's no one around and it makes me wonder idly: When no one is there is there any there there? The question is dusted, like the cars in the street, with loneliness, but it is not a loneliness that finds much purchase.

It made me think of radar.

How much of anyone's life is employed in being aware, in assessing and reassessing circumstances and environment, in scouting for delight and danger, in fabricating defense and offense, in ... well ... just being aware?

A parent, for example, becomes a finely-tuned radar after the baby arrives. Every cough and sniffle and cry shows up in a nanosecond on the radar screen. A soldier in combat is keenly aware of every twig-snap or change in the shadows "out there."

But setting aside such obvious and compelling instances, isn't the rest of anyone's life pretty much the same? Less intensely, perhaps, but still the habit is enormous ... keeping an eye on things without a second thought. Life-threatening or life-improving ... keeping an eye on things. Maybe being aware in a radar-like sense is just one definition of what it means to be alive.

But then, suddenly, my wife and son have left for New Jersey and the objects that had been on my radar screen are no longer there. The work of the radar screen is no longer necessary or even makes much sense. There is a certain restfulness on the one hand. The facts are just the facts and scanning or manipulating them as if there were some Rubik's cube to align ... well, the cube is just the cube.

Naturally an ingrown, lifelong habit is not about to roll over and play dead just because there is one small bit of recognition or perspective or whatever it is. If something goes missing on the radar screen, the radar screen searches out other points of contact. That's what radar screens do, after all. That's what habits do and calling it foolish or ill-conceived or untrue or unwise ... that's just radar-screen talk.

With the absence of my wife and son, I did wonder for a moment if the radar screen could possibly be turned off -- if, when finding a chink in its lifelong armor, the armor itself were proven somehow unworthy and mistaken. But then I thought that that was just another of those fatuous, inept and ersatz-spiritual conclusions.

In a practical sense, people would starve to death without radar. They would give themselves over to the mental and physical incontinence of an old-age home. It would be like sending the kids out to play in traffic. They would be unhappy in the same way they might be when crediting their radar. Lifelong habits may be confounding and painful -- or clarifying and full of delight -- but they're just habits ... fix 'em when necessary and otherwise leave 'em alone.

Habits ... OK. But the trick is ...

No one says you have to believe them.

And there's no reason not to enjoy them.

My wife and son went to New Jersey. The house is tinged with their absence.

It's on my radar screen.