A poem – by Guberman, I think – comes to mind.
I had a friend who fed himself to lice
Mending his rags as old as life
Cut out Creation’s likeness nice
And hunted God… without a knife
Chapter 5. Look what the cat coughed up…
What does it mean to be in the right place at the right time?
In the nerdy parlance of overly smart mathematicians, this means having the right space and time coordinates at a given moment.
That is, F (x, y, z, t) = f (t), where f (t) is that tricky function essential to success and to the feeling of deep mental satisfaction.
Anybody get that?
To put it simply, here’s an example: Say a cat runs across the road, escaping the cars prone to hit her any second.
Three things have always amazed me:
1. As a rule, the cat runs without looking around, instead looking steadily at some point ahead.
2. But if it stops and takes a look around, the cat is bound to be run over.
3. A simple yet amazing fact: a car drives through the spot where the cat was a second ago, but the cat is already not there.
Here, the following analogies offer themselves:
1. A person crossing the road of life looks at a point ahead of them like the cat. They can only see their ultimate goal and trot toward it.
This sort of obsession is a distinguishing trait of so-called ambitious people. That is, those who achieve success, for it is ambitious people that do.
There’s a certain secret to it, and in fact it’s a property of human consciousness. You can look at thousands of things, but you can only see those that your eyes search for, and once you see them, you just keep on looking at them. That’s as simple as that, and everyone knows it, but…
…Duck hunters know a funny thing: a duck shot while flying falls into the grass, and as the duck falls, the hunter mechanically follows its path with his eyes. Every hunter sees the spot the duck has fallen onto and then goes there to pick it up, but they won’t find it unless they look steadily at the spot as they approach it.
But if they only remember the spot approximately and go searching for the duck on the just assumption that their six to eight pounds of brains guarantee locating a lousy duck in the grass, ninety-nine percent of them will never find it, dead or not dead.
Why do they find no duck? The duck can’t have crawled away to heaven, right?