A memorable childhood moment from the 1980’s was Rick Hansen’s Man in Motion wheelchair tour across Canada. In glowing terms my kindergarten teacher explained to us that anytime Hansen felt the urge he could wheel himself up to the drive-thru window of a local McDonalds. Whipping out a special card designed for the purpose, while simultaneously advertising the dominant fast-food chain, our handicapped superhero could eat for free!
Mouths agape in awe at the prospect of an unlimited stream of happy meals and plastic toys, we pupils embraced Hansen’s daily travels in rapt suspense: each day the teacher would move a little cardboard wheelchair from town to town across an immense map of the country that she had thoughtfully stapled to a bulletin board. (Meanwhile, in my family, my dad was on a two-month science exchange in the backwoods of Manchuria; the context was as stark as any young gaffer could imagine.) Never did we ever think, in our pint-sized minds, that probably Hansen more frequently went foraging for a garden salad and some fresh meat. In our minds the poetry of this man in motion was that as he passed from province to province he was ever in pursuit of that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: golden fries, delicious beef patties, and a large soda pop beverage to wash it all down. And this was before the advent of super-sized menu items, I don’t think we could have handled that kind of excitement! The pursuit of pleasure, rather than diligence for the sake of the grind, remains the hedonistic backdrop by which we can see our life travails. After all, if we’re not aiming for a good time then all we have left is the awareness that we’re on earth for a short time.
As we grow up, and out, the law of whimsy is our perpetual companion. It’s not enough to have academic options and sufficient funds: some say that what we humans want most is the freedom to be seized by our impulses such that we can be propelled into action by that most magical of miracles: poesy. The power of poesy compels us, as it were. Hansen’s wheelchair stimulated our fantasies of being lauded for accomplishments while tapping into the depths of the human heart. These two goals dovetailed within that mightiest of treats: a trip to McDonald’s.
Going places essentially happens in the mind, symbolically. We know this from dreams and from any moment we sit down to face the blank page of a word processing document. Likewise, only when seized by an impulse do our actions truly have meaning. We can plan for inspiration, but the magic has to strike us. Henry Miller, in his classic once-banned Tropic of Cancer, wrote about embracing the grimy reality of life, talking turkey with eternity. He surmised: “I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.” The comfort of consistency, the negligible efficacy of placing an order at the drive thru window of life and receiving exactly what we came for, can at best be seen as merely a short cut to the grave; that is, a method by which we play the game and arrive at the end still treading the same board at the same table and facing the same, board-flipping tantrums of those who took themselves too seriously along the way.
Over this horizon of abject discontent lies another, poetic, option, one grappled with as an alternative when Max Weber (facing down the spectre of World War I that had claimed the soldiering life of his son) wrote of: “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” Setting aside the brevity of our critical thinking wit we might as a rejoinder howl, with sterling Caribean poet Aime Cesaire: “reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze!” And finally, with the circa 1900 teenage Quebecois poet Amiel Nelligan we could ask ourselves, after a lifetime pockmarked with worthwhile adventure, “could it be that I am happy?”
Happiness to be sure is in the eye of the beholder; perhaps underpinning all of life is a designation of what counts as fulfillment. Happiness requires us to define our terms, to feel it, rather than blithely claim that we know if when we see it. Epistemology, the art of knowing how we know what we know, implicates us as wayfarers of our destiny – by wheel, by foot, and above all by mind. Seizing upon the briefest forays into the land of inspiration we must find a way to incite a link between the drabness of academia and the floating clouds of our heartfelt imaginings. From there, like a shooting star that becomes a wish upon a star, our remaining task is to link our mental expression with words on a page: our mental labour must produce an artifact back on earth in material reality.
Just as criminal convictions rest on intent, so does the production of happiness require our conscious and earnest participation (or a reasonable facsimile, hence the fake it till you make it adage). Hansen proved to Canada that the beauty of going somewhere lies in the good works associated with the journey; unlike earthworms or clouds, what makes life livable is the meaning we attach to it – and the funds as well as fun we raise. From town to town, like an iron-bicep vagabond, the brave young man demonstrated that anything is possible when passion meets determination. (My Dad had even had Hansen as a university pupil in Biology 101 – long before wheelchair ramps were an architectural necessity. Instead of feeling victimized Hansen put his efforts into positive results, while smiling along the way.) It bears remembering, in life as in our studies, that we will enjoy the horizon so much more if we have some fun along the way.
