There was a time you were trapped in a box canyon, no way out, escape impossible, UNTIL…
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Life is full of box canyons. How easily we’re lured into their labyrinthine lairs. We stumble in circles, groping like the blind for the exit, any exit.
We bounce from pillar to post, hopelessly hemmed in, staggering deeper into the dead end of despair. Disaster’s ghoulish grin mocks us, waiting silently at the end for the end. We need Houdini.
Like Houdini, we know what it means to have been boxed in by circumstances, buried alive by insolvable situations, packed and put away to marinate like a box of salted mullet.
How many were the times our hands were shackled, our feet in fetters, dragging about the chains and manacles of the past like Dicken’s ghost of Jacob Marley?
Houdini has become a metaphor for escape, an example of how to be constrained by a straitjacket, put in a box and sunk, or buried, and, with no possible means of escape, still get out. Can we appropriate such a metaphor to our own sorry state of affairs?
Remember when you were underwater, drowning in debt, no way out, the end was near? The paycheck evaporated; the bonus wasn’t there. The credit cards maxed; the mortgage overdue, car in the shop, the kid’s college tuition check that bounced.
Oh, those sleepless nights listening to the Greek chorus rehearsing its funeral dirge. You were about to give up, take your last breath, UNTIL…then something happened, a door opened, a relief showed up. You escaped.
Remember the brilliant idea you once had? The idea that generated more laughter than accolades and labeled you as just another hair-brained crackpot. Even your best friends avoided you. UNTIL, against all odds, it worked out.
Often ideas and discoveries seem surprisingly simple and easy after the fact. Columbus experienced this. His detractors diminished his discovery of the Americas as inevitable and no big deal. So, what did he do?
To prove his point, he challenged them to balance an egg on its end. Can’t be done, they said. UNTIL Columbus tapped the egg on its end, and it stood upright, proving that creativity is a sure-fire getaway. There’s a key for everything. Find it.
Sometimes the mind gets bogged down in blind alleys. Remember the Gordian Knot? It’s often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem solved easily by creativity. It remained a problem UNTIL Alexander the Great showed up, sliced the knot in half. No more knot, no more problem. Pretend you’re Alex.
The sociopathic Stalin had his own problem, UNTIL he reduced it into its simplest terms: people were the problem. Therefore, the solution was simply fewer people. History proves his sadistic point.
We also have people problems, situations so bizarre it’s as if an elephant were conducting the circus. Houdini made an elephant disappear once in front of a packed-house audience. What’s our escape plan?
The enormity of dysfunctional familial and social relationships finds us with poor exit strategies. People are constantly at one another’s throats, friends falling out over petty dystopian differences, swearing and calling each other bad names. Such is rampant in homeowner associations, little league sports and all church committees.
Down to the last straw, we plead with ‘Forgiveness’ for help. It shakes its head, says the cacophonous chatter of the me, my and mine generation drowns out all logic. Still, it may be the simplest means of making the elephant disappear.
Mohammed was a pious fellow, if not a little full of himself. He prayed himself into a corner attempting to prove he could move a mountain by prayer. It never budged.
He was publicly ridiculed for his folly. He gave up fasting, dusted off the ashes, shook off the sackcloth of pride and instead went to the mountain. He found it a crowded maze, a mosh pit of people pushing and shoving, all trying to get to the top. Some were Democrats.
He was perplexed UNTIL The Voice said, “Mohammad, mountaintops are for looking at the world, not a place where the world looks at you.”
Houdini had his tricks, and like any magician had an exit strategy. Most of us depend on native intelligence, innate common sense and a dose of good luck which always seems too little, too late. It helps perspective to remember, “The Almighty may never send a fortune when a shilling will do.”
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If Houdini is a metaphor, then so are we. Often trapped, no way out UNTIL…now finish the sentence with details of your own narrow escape.
Bud Hearn
July 19, 2019