I do believe I'll win, I do believe I'll win, I do I do I do believe I'll win

When I was at the convenience store earlier I impulsively bought two lottery tickets, one for the Powerball game, and the other a Megabucks ticket. This is something I do very, very rarely, mainly because I know it to be a waste of my money, but also because I feel awkward doing it, as a result of almost never doing it! I don't know the proper terminology, or even (until recently) the proper procedure. And you know me and hating to appear foolish.

But there was no one else in the store at the moment but me and "Rusty," the (female) cashier, and I wasn't worried about appearing foolish to her. I was just going to buy one ticket, but when she asked "Do you want the Powerball or Megabucks (which is the first time I knew the two were not the same), I thought, what the heck, in for a penny, in for a pound.

So do I really expect to win? Well, no. I do know that the odds of my winning are absurdly small (more likely to get struck by lightning, isn't that how it goes?); besides which I am too much the eternal pessimist. But I'd like to be some-one who expected to win. Isn't that what all those self-help gurus say, "You've got to envision what you want to happen, and it will," and “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change,” (that one is a direct quote from PBS's irritating Dr Wayne Dyer). Well, I have lots of times envisioned myself winning the lottery -- know exactly what I'd do with all that money, in what order -- but obviously I must take the additional step and occasionally play, in order to win.

What it all comes down to, I think, is faith. I simply am not a person of faith. And to get through this life with anything approaching equanimity, it seems to me that one really does need to have faith in something. If not in a loving, merciful god who will take care of you, than in yourself, or in the various forces at work in the universe ("It'll all work out in the end," "Things have a way of working out," etc.) That's what those people who play the lottery for literally years, and finally win, have. Faith that eventually God will answer their prayers, or that that mysterious thing called Luck will finally look their way.

It's the same kind of faith that people have who keep sending out manuscripts they've written, even though they get rejected time after time. They believe that eventually someone will like what they've written, and help them to publish it. I have never had that faith, and so have tended to give up after a few tries -- then maybe I'll try again a few times, after a few years have passed -- then give up again in discouragement. Never get published that way, never win the lottery.

I'm inclined to think that the ability to have faith -- which produces hope -- is the most important characteristic one can have in life. Even more than compassion, which I think is extremely important, even more than energy, which is necessary to get anything accomplished, one must have faith, or one is likely to be saddled with a negative outlook on life.

But it has to be real; you can't fake faith. Aye, there's the rub.

Looking for an explanation

Why can't things be the way they're supposed to be? Why are so many events/situations/purchased products/people not quite as they should be? Why is perfection such an impossibility? We all know that it is, but why?

Turns out there's something wrong with my new lawn mower (besides the fact that I don't have the correct instruction manual for it). A knob that holds one part to another part keeps coming off as I'm mowing. This is the third thing that has been not quite right about this "purchased product"-- the first having been that Lowe's sold me a lawn mower without an instruction manual, the second, that they then supplied me with the wrong manual. This is a long way from perfection.

And now I have to take the damn thing back, which makes the situation painfully far from perfection. Roll it out my basement door, around to the side of the house, up the slope to the driveway, fold the thing up, heft it into my car, make the 20 minute drive to Lowe's, heft it out of my car, do my share of waiting at Customer Service (I already did a lot of waiting when I went back for the manual which turned out to be the wrong manual), with who knows what outcome, since this was the last one of this model they had.

I did at least get my lawn mowed. Took three days, about 40 minutes each day, since my stamina is almost non-existent, and since the grass was so high, and on the second day so wet, that I had to take a stroke back for each stroke forward, in order to get it all. But you know, except for the damn knob that I kept having to go back and look for in the grass when I would realize it had fallen off again because the handle had started coming apart again, I was really pleased with the thing. Cordless electric is definitely the way to go. But now what's going to happen?

And then there are my new curtains. You remember the bathroom curtains Cozy Cottage was going to make for me? They were ready in only a week, rather than the two the woman had thought it would take, and they're very pretty -- the fabric goes just fine with my bathroom decor, which I'd been worried about -- but they're too short. In this case, the answer to why something isn't perfect is: I screwed up. My length-wise measurement was off by half an inch. But actually there's one other thing that's "not quite right": the hem is too wide. When we were discussing how I wanted the curtains made, and the woman said, "And you'll probably want a five or six inch hem, to give it weight," I was taken aback -- that seemed mighty wide to me -- but I figured she was the expert. But as it turns out the curtain is so small, because the window is so small, that the wide hem is notice-ably out-of-proportion.

So I've decided I have to take the curtains back, too. Have her increase the length, and narrow the hem, undoubtedly for an additional charge. What price the urge to perfection.

Oh, but it's so gorgeous in our neck of the woods now. The faint green haze that could be seen in all the trees a week ago has been replaced by lush green foliage. The trees are back! The green is back! All the lilac bushes are blooming! We've had temperatures in the 60s, and low humidity. If you don't look too closely, this is perfection.

A rule made to be broken?

I recently read a very short, insignificant, moderately entertaining book called Rules for aging: Resist normal impulses, live longer, attain perfection. You can see the author's tongue planted firmly in cheek even in the title. The author, by the way, is Roger Rosenblatt, whose publisher, HarperCollins, refers to him as an "award-winning essayist for Time and PBS."

Rosenblatt's Rule #1 (which is both Garrison Keillor's and Jim Lehrer's favorite of the rules, according to the inside front cover of the book) made me laugh out loud when I first read it. To wit:

"It doesn't matter. Whatever you think matters -- doesn't. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late, or early...if you were clever, or if you were stupid; if you are having a bad hair day, or a no hair day...if you don't get that promotion, or prize, or house, or if you do. It doesn't matter."*

And of course, "it" doesn't. Not in the Grand Scheme of Things. Or, as we used to say when and where I was growing up: "What'll it matter a hundred years from now?" And no doubt Rule #1 is really an encour-agement to keep ones perspective, similar to the now-annoying cliche "Don't sweat the small stuff...and it's all small stuff."

But. After I'd read the whole book -- which takes maybe half an hour, and which provids plenty of other chuckles (e.g., "Just because the person who criticizes you is an idiot doesn't make him wrong.") -- and I went back and read Rule #1 again, I didn't laugh so hard. It is, in fact, if you think about it long enough, a depressing rule. A depress-ing idea. If we don't make things matter, or don't at least convince ourselves that things matter, we become in danger of losing our sense of purpose. And people lacking a sense of purpose tend to sit around staring at the walls or the T.V., living on McDonald's takeout and beer. And, come on, what kind of a life is that?

So we make things matter, we make what we do seem important, necessary, at the very least to ourselves. Thus, we are able to make ourselves get out of bed, prepare decent meals, go every day to a job that we don't much like (or even hate), do this that and the other thing. Because it's necessary, it matters.

Of course, in some cases what we do really is important-- many of the things President Obama (or any president) does, or might do, could have drastic repercussions for millions of people. The dastardly suicide bombers could be said to be doing something that matters, in a highly negative sense, to at least the dozens of innocent people they kill, as well as to those people's families.

But for the rest of us...all us "little people"...let's face it, the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the wins and losses, it just doesn't matter.

But pretending it does can keep you sane.

*Rosenblatt, Roger. Rules for aging: Resist normal impulses, live longer, attain perfection, New York: Harcourt, c2000, p. 1.