The Hardest Kind of Learning

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The hardest kind of learning happens in the night

when you wake from the weight

of a single thought

that settles

in your mind

like a

stone

that finally hits the ocean floor

long after it leaves your grasp,

and you sit upright—eyes wide in the dark…

still holding in the gasp.

© Copyright 2000/2004, TK, Patterns of Ink

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It takes a long time for some things to hit me. I can talk about a fact or event, mark it on a calendar, believe it's real, anticipate it, etc., but sometimes things just don't hit me until they happen. Sometimes, in fact, they hit me long afterwards.

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Take last week's Florida trip with our seniors. We had a great time, came home, and stepped right back into reality. Yesterday I stared at some pictures of Destin that made it all seem like a blur. Tomorrow night those seniors graduate. One year ago on this same Friday night, my second daughter graduated. Where did that year go?

Four years ago on that night, my oldest daughter graduated. In exactly one month, she's getting married to her high school sweetheart who marched with her on that night. We've been talking about their wedding since July; it's marked on the calendar; I know it's real and I'm very happy about it; we're anticipating a great event... but it hasn't hit me yet—not fully. I wonder when it will.

I wrote the poem above several years ago after snapping out of a dream that sat me up in bed.

In the years following my father's death, I would randomly dream that he was with us again in very familiar settings. It was as if he was "on leave" from heaven. We were all aware that he would not be there long, but it felt natural and we'd not say or do anything that would cut short the visit. It's been years since I've had one of these pleasant dreams, but the night I wrote the lines I had awakened from one in which I was trying to say something to Dad alone.

The Christmas Break before Dad died we were visiting home. Dad and I had discussed something the night before I drove back to Iowa from Michigan. [I was putting my nose in my parents business and telling him to hire a contractor to build the breezeway since Mom had been waiting for years. He was disappointed that I had intruded and simply assured me that her breezeway would be done soon enough. I regretted having said anything.]  When we hugged goodbye on the driveway, I sensed we still needed better closure. I regretted that I had spoken my mind the night before, but I didn't say anything. I later wrote him a card about it and told him how much he meant to me. Mom assured me he got the letter and appreciated it and that everything was fine. Dad and never talked about it again, and our phone calls made me more eager to visit face to face over Spring Break, but before that time together came, we were called for his funeral.

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The evening after the service, Mom called her five kids back to their bedroom to give all us an article of Dad's clothing. As we were sorting through things, I found my long handwritten card in the top of his sock drawer. I was happy to see it there. I left the letter and took an old polo shirt of Dad's. Some may think it strange, but twelve years later I still have that shirt in a Ziploc bag. I love the smell of it.

Anyway, the night I woke from this dream, I wanted to say something "in person" to Dad, but reality started seeping into the cracks of the dream and he was suddenly no longer sitting on the couch when I turned to talk to him. I sat up in bed, holding in an empty sob then blurting into the darkness, "You were right, Dad!"

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The gravity of thought is measured not by weight but impact.

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A week ago this morning, as our return jet was taking off from Florida, I looked out the window and saw the turquoise water by the white sand become deeper and deeper blue. It reminded me of this title poem.
Our first full day in Destin, we were all swimming in that lightest band of blue. Some of the seniors had never been in the ocean. One was seriously afraid as she put it, "because of all the fish and sharks and stuff out there," but she eventually joined us.
Some of her classmates reassured her there were no sharks in the "gulf" part of the ocean. I didn't say anything, of course, but that isn't true. The strange thing about the ocean is that sharks, whales, and all sorts of sea creatures really are "out there" in the deep. It's just so vast we tend not to trip over them as we swim in the waves.
To illustrate the metaphor of this poem: if you were on an ocean liner over the average depth of the ocean (about 2.5 miles deep), it would take hours for a rock dropped from your hand to hit the ocean floor. If the ship were traveling at standard cruising speed (roughly 30 MPH), you could be 70 miles or more from the splash point when the rock poofs in the silt on the ocean floor. That's hard to fathom, isn't it?
Wreckage of the RMS Titanic (postcard above) was found at about 12,500 feet below the surface. That's ten Empire State Buildings down.
"The oceans are WAY deeper below sea level than the cruising altitude of our jet from Destin to Detroit was above it. The Marianas Trench is over 33,000 feet deep, nearly three times as deep as the ocean floor. Even whales never go below 3,500 feet. They only go deeper when they die. Yes, like all creatures, whales eventually die and most of them sink to the ocean floor as "whale falls." They are preserved in the near freezing temperatures for several decades and each huge carcass creates a macabre "feeding" ecosystem all its own.
The ocean depths still hold many mysteries—that's why it's called the final frontier of earth. If my timid student had seen this video or these creatures of the deep, we would never have convinced her to take her first dip in salt water.

Learning facts like this about the less familiar faces and places of the sea is fun and easy with the internet, but the facts of life are just splashes in the water. The Hardest Kind of Learning happens some time later when the realities of life finally settle in.
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