Unidentified Artist: Avoid Accidents! Think of Safety!
[Series/Book Title: Social Museum Collection] (c. 1903)

" … we ended up Accidentially thriving there …"

Our Exile separated The Muse and me from much more than our beloved home. It also separated us from our accustomed means of thriving. The Bankruptcy cleaned out our liquidity and, with that, our sense of identity. If we lacked money, how would we be able to continue pursuing our purpose? How would we be able to purchase what we needed to survive, especially once we'd relocated into one of the pricier housing markets in the country? We had no idea how we'd survive. We kept moving forward As If, perhaps taking heart from the parable of The Birds of the Field, who apparently manage to get by without the usual means to survive. They manage to live Accidentally On Purpose if that makes any sense. Of course, that notion makes no sense whatsoever to anyone schooled in this culture. Here, we carefully plot our course before purchasing passage. We thrive through planning, or so we continually insist. We're schooled to avoid accidents and believe that accidents result from poor planning and that accidents suggest terrible things about us. We even revile the accident-prone.

The Muse and I set about living Accidentally On Purpose. We were forced to admit that we had no clue how we might do what we intended to accomplish. We'd find someplace to rent and work out from there, but how would we find a place to rent with our recent bankruptcy haunting us? We had no clue, so we assumed everything might work out fine. We proceeded As If, with little other than some determination behind this. The determination was perhaps less rooted in certainty than in desperation. Who knows what mindset the fabled Birds of the Field bring to their efforts? They might be terrified every second that they might not find sustenance, regardless of who or what might have set them up to succeed. Who would those birds have to be to foresee their continuing good fortune? They, too, probably proceeded As If. Who's to say they didn't?

We, through necessity, became more skilled at Accidentally living. It became a viable means for achieving pretty much everything. I'd head out to look for someplace to live and invariably get lost. I'd perhaps wisely presumed that I'd be better off navigating that strange city without carrying a map since I was wary of developing too much of a dependence upon maps. I'd Accidentally get lost, and then figure out how to get found again. By learning the territory this way, I came to understand it my way, amplifying my self-esteem along with my mobility. Even people who had lived in The District for decades tended to be impressed with my knowledge of what I called Secret Passages, odd ways to get between places. These emerged only after I got good and lost and were found by my presumption that I would eventually find my way again. I proceeded there As If.

In this way, we broadened our capabilities. Before being Exiled, we tried to live within our means. Bankruptcy found us anyway. Once Exiled, we had no choice but to live well beyond what we would have previously concluded we could afford. When searching for a permanent place to live, we had not seen a single place we could have previously afforded. The means by which we calculated what we could afford were reasonable, prudent, and likely to avoid most accidents. We felt forced to set those means aside in the interest of surviving. We became as if we were Birds of the Field. We proceeded As If. After all of our planning and execution, when we found The Place, we did so by sincere accident. Our diligent planning had put us into the neighborhood of choice early that Sunday morning and The Muse's nearly constant refreshing of the Craiglist page left her first to respond when The Place was first announced.

Minutes later, we pulled up in front of another unpromising place to be met by the next-door neighbor, Clair, who the owner had enlisted to interview potential renters. I later declared Clair, a devout atheist, The Angel Clair because of what he did for us there. Clair and I would grow to become brothers, buying each other endless rounds of appreciative beers. We clearly had no business there in a neighborhood we could scant afford to inhabit, yet we ended up Accidentally thriving there like those god-damned or -blessed Birds of the effing Field.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz