Painting titled COMMUNITY by Christopher Cudworth depicts the Wilson Street Bridge and downtown traffic in Batavia, Illinois. The triple jumper represents personal achievement.
Last night following a busy Christmas Day in which we celebrated at three different homes, my mind went to work when the head hit the pillow.
The dreams that came about were all about what it means to have a sense of place. That’s what the inventive part of your brain can do sometimes. The mind can really run you around when it wants to try. Thus I found myself dreaming about an obligation or commitment to an animal rescue facility at which I was supposed to give a fundraising speech.
But first I was scheduled to speak at a church about the book I published on religion. The pastor and I sat talking about the address, and the more we talked, the less things we agreed upon to talk about.
“I know the way…”
In fact, I offered to simply cancel the address to his church, but asked him for a ride to the next commitment on my schedule. We climbed into his car and within seconds were off into some neighborhood that I didn’t recognize. That feeling got worse the further we went along. Finally, I turned to him and asked why we were taking such an odd route.
“I know the way,” I told him. “Why don’t you just ask me?”
He turned to me and with full conviction said these words. “I don’t believe in bridges.”
“Any kind of bridges?” I asked him. “Even little ones?”
He shook his head. So we kept driving and I felt a sense of irritation growing within me. We showed up on the far west side of a town I partially recognized. When I hopped out of the car, we were parked in a vast industrial park next to an airport. It was a local airport I knew from the size of the hangars. Making my way toward down, the tips of the buildings disappeared below the nearer buildings. Slowly I felt a sense of being lost in a place where I did not know where to turn.
So I walked inside a building and it was some sort of official government office. An employee swooped over and guided me into a room where a woman sat me down for questioning.
I asked, “How do I get downtown?”
She was not forthcoming with answers. In fact, a series of increasingly oblique people started coming by trying to confuse me somehow. The entire notion of “knowing where I was” started to dissipate within the dream.
And then I woke up.
Translations
The whole “lost in the downtown” thing didn’t bother me. That’s a product of a loose schedule the week following Christmas. This zone between holidays is always a bit unsettling. One has the feeling of pending obligations, yet all sorts of people are taking time off. You have to do this dance between working diligently and letting things slide.
But the “I don’t believe in bridges” thing? It takes a little analysis to parse that out.
So…you know… they always say that dreams are all about what’s wandering through your own head.
So I looked up bridges on one of those dream interpretation sites and this is what it said: To dream that you are crossing a bridge signifies an important decision or a critical junction in your life. This decision will prove to be a positive change filled with prosperity and wealth in the horizon.
That’s all okay with me.2016 has been a year in which many life changes have occurred. One could say that I’ve crossed a number of major bridges just this year: engagement, selling my home, finding a new home, melding our families as we all plant our futures together.
So it is not fear of change that might be holding me back. Instead, I’m going to defer that interpretation by considering the notion that it is resistance from others that more typically makes it difficult to cross those bridges when you come to them. When we set out to “chase those dreams” there are often people who tell us it can’t be done, or refuse to believe in the bridges we map out for ourselves. This can even occur at the macro level in a society. And so it has.
Real people dreams
It so happens that the pastor who appeared in my dream is a real person from my past. I know his belief system fairly well because he preached it from the pulpit for many years. He does not, for example, believe in science such as theory of evolution. He also takes the Bible literally on many fronts. To me, is symbolic of so much going on in this world. The idea that someone “does not believe in bridges” is simple an example of an obstinate denial of practical reality. Thus it is also evidential of the major impediments in rational discourse these days. People who don’t abide in facts cannot be convinced their beliefs are wrong. Thus it’s possible to let one’s fear of knowledge take over to the point where one might make the statement, “I don’t believe in bridges.”
Cultivate our garden
Certainly, we’re all about to face some of that in the year to come. 2017 will be a journey worthy of the book Candide, in which a band of liberal innocents stray into the world and wind up getting all kinds of spiritual and physical abuse before they straggle back home, having been robbed and raped and disabused of their idealistic intentions.
At the end of the book, they gather back home and admit to one another that perhaps it is best to get back to basics. “We must cultivate our garden,” they all agree.
It so happens that I’m at work on a book titled Nature Is My Country Club. The book uses the game of golf as a way to look at the natural world, and how we human beings interact with it. So that’s my garden to cultivate. It speaks about issues of sustainability and perception. It also places the human race in context with creation. To me, that is the bridge to sanity we all must consider.
The garden of fitness
The other garden I plan to cultivate is a better plan for personal fitness this year. I’ve been a bit of an “echo” triathlete, drifting along with whatever training life offers. But I know better. I need my own focus and plan and structure for swimming, cycling and running.
I know how to do that quite well. The training plans I’ve written for myself in the past were productive in achieving running and cycling goals. So that will be the bridge I construct this week. It will be done with pen on legal pad. Then I’ll set up a journal in which to map out and document the plan as it goes along.
Because I do believe in bridges, and many other kinds of rational structure, evidence of evolution and cause and effect in this world. There are some things you can trust to God, but there are many things you need to do for yourself. That’s how it works. And that’s the bridge between life here on earth and whatever comes after.
The class they never taught in Home Economics class. Gift wrapping. One of the most useful skills in all human activity. Completely ignored.
For the last thirty years on Christmas morning I’ve gone for a run on a golf course north of my in-laws’ house in Addison, Illinois. But with family dynamics shifting around for our clan, we’ll be out in the Fox Valley on December 25 to open gifts with my wife-to-be’s kids.
The coffee shop named 
Little brick bungalow
Seconds later, his life changes as the police roll up to inform him that his father has just suffered a stroke. Bailey’s face goes from joy to dread in that moment.
Through it all, my running and riding have been sanity keepers. And while I ceased hard competitive training upon once my children were born, there have been many great times training with old and new friends. My two best buddies are guys with whom I raced and trained in high school cross country and track. One of them was a college teammate as well. We later lived together in Chicago. All of us take care of each other in manifold ways. I am so grateful for these friendships. There have been thick and thin times for all of us raising kids and managing marriages for better or worse.
onnection to the skinny form of Jimmy Stewart and George Bailey. The real lesson of It’s a Wonderful Life is found in this dramatic contrast between a life lived with concern for others and a life centered only around the selfish plot to gain more money.
The parallels between the last eight years of Bedford Falls and the potential Pottersville we now face are disturbing. Recall where we were eight years ago. That’s when Bush and that mimic of Henry Potter named Dick Cheney had made a miserable wreck of things. The economy and financial institutions were collapsing under their own unregulated weight, yet were deemed “too big to fail” and in dire straits.
Trump and the Potters of this world
Such is the cynical nature of the Henry Potters fo this world. And now we have the White Elephant President about to take office and create Pottersville all over again.
A couple weeks back I went to Dick’s Sporting Goods and purchased a set of clear goggles for swimming. All this fall I’d been swimming in the dark tinted lenses that had been so great for outdoor swimming where the sun shone brightly. But when it comes to indoor swimming, dark goggles are not ideal.
Want to read more by Christopher Cudworth? Click here to read today’s humorous yet pointed commentary about 
The ultimate show of skill is to serve the ball and never let the opponent touch the ball. This requires a certain amount of finesse. If one can strike the ball at an angle that puts it out of reach on the opponent’s side, and keep it going fast, the rope will make a perfect coil around the top of the pole before the ball swings closer and closer. When it actually strikes the pole, the game is over.
So I made up my mind to lose. I don’t recall who became the victor. It didn’t matter anymore. I just wanted out.
While riding home from church on Sunday morning, Sue and I had a laugh at the lyrics of that holiday tune, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” You know the tale, don’t you? It’s one of the most ‘date-rapey’ songs ever written.
All these songs were playing through my head as Sunday morning arrived with temperatures at four below zero and a wind chill of minus fourteen degrees. We all need something to sing when we get out the door in those temperatures. A Christmas tune earworm can help get you through those first five minutes when a risk of frostbite first hits your skin at the cheekbones.
Then I glanced down at what I thought was a dead mouse. Only it turned out to be a leaf that had the same shape. So many winters I have come across such dead things and wondered about their last moments. That’s the real reason for the season. The universe is a cold, largely lifeless place. It is ours to calculate our minorly warm presence in the face of such extravagant desolation and dark matter.
In the last 400 meters toward home, I cut through a field with snow drifts that were sculpted by the wind. These were artfully arranged, and I tried to avoid the prettier parts to allow the universe to have its way with the look and feel of the place. Yet as I arrived in my own backyard, the temptation to run through the drifts was too great and I shot a slow motion video that you can find on my Instagram account 
On a visit to my friends at 
Then I’d open one of the packs of baseball cards if I’d purchased them that day. And hope like hell for players that I did not already have, or at least that I’d heard of before. It was quite a joy and something of a feat to find a Roberto Clemente or Mickey Mantle in your new set of baseball cards. But for some reason, I kept winding up with duplicates of players from the Philadelphia Phillies or New York Mets. I hated the Phillies because I’d been to their cheap concrete stadium, plus they typically sucked in the 1960s. And the New York Mets I hated because I never liked the colors blue and orange together. Not as a kid. But I credit that to some form of childhood OCD.
“Yeah, it’s like guitars,” he agreed. “So many models. You can never have too many.”
Some of the bikes at PPC had paint jobs that were nearly that loud. I wanted them all. Every last one of them. But just like the little kid in the candy story all those years ago, I know that choices must be made. I already own a carbon-fiber aero style Specialized Venge Expert, a Waterford steel bike with a blue paint job that gives classic bike fans an orgasm when they look at it, and my sturdy old Specialized Rockhopper mountain bike.
After attending church on Sunday, my nose started to tingle by that evening. We visited the Praise Service and participated in an ad hoc Nativity Scene in which everyone chose a character to portray. There were Wise Men and Angels, Sheep and Donkeys. Joseph and Mary too.
