Wait, how did the goat get here?

When things go terribly, terribly wrong

My friends and I like to do this exercise, especially when one of us is sad or upset, where we make a long, absurd joke out of the entire situation. It usually starts with whatever is really going on, but then we elaborate on it until it becomes surreal.

If you start from the first line and go through the entire improv comedy sequence, at least it makes sense. But if you go from the first line to the end, it’s really silly. And funny. And laughter is the best medicine.

Not long ago I was sad about something or other, and my friend and I came up with a long series of unlikely events that ended up in me dating a goatherd. At which point I said, “Wait, how did the goat get here?”

Han Solo was known to say, “This day isn’t turning out the way I thought it would,” and life if like that. I’ve written a great deal lately about how things haven’t turned out the way I thought they would, largely for the better. I never could have imagined some of the horrors of the world, but I never could have imagined some of the good things either - like meeting my new family.

Still, occasionally a goat wanders onto the stage. Leaving us to say, “Who let the goat in?”

Do you ever think you have complete control over a situation, only to find things spinning wildly out of control and it seems that everything you do makes it worse? You’ve let the goat in.

I find that when things seem too good to be true, there is often a goat lurking in the wings. The appearance of the goat is tied to our inability to see clearly, and we lose the ability to see clearly when we let emotion get the best of us. Zen practice is in large part about learning to see clearly. Not to see what we want to see or what we think we should see, but to see what is.

That is not to dismiss the power of miracles, luck, opportunity, the hand of God or whatever you want to call it. But things that come out of nowhere tend to return to nowhere. When we fight this reality… I hear the clippity clop of goat hooves in the middle of my living room on the hard wood floor.

Things that distract us from the reality in which we are living tend to breed goats. Texting and social media are the worst for this. Texting takes our minds off where we are and leads us to run into telephone poles. I am just as guilty of it as anyone, but too much texting can create a fantasy world, obscuring the real world in front of us.

The problem is, the real world is often boring or filled with realities we would rather not face, so escape into whatever is pleasant. I am a huge fan of the escape fantasy, but when we forget that it is a fantasy… a goat walks across the street we are about to cross in a busy urban square where a goat should not be and we are so busy looking at our phones that we run right into it, causing a traffic accident and leading everyone in our metro area to ask, “Who let the goat onto Broad Street?”

A good goat check (not to be confused with a coat check) is the question, “What would a reasonable person think about the way I am thinking/behaving?” You can even ask a reasonable person, if you happen to know one. I’d give you the number of my most reliable reasonable person, but she’s way too busy ACTUALLY saving the world to talk to me most of the time, and would not appreciate me freely handing out her phone number.

Since my most reasonable person is often quite occupied, I do a “What would Ms. X say?” test in my own head.

If Ms. X would say, “Girl, you need to chill with your bad self,” (which she has said, upon occasion), I need to chill with my bad self. The upside to having a vivid imagination and a giant metaphorical heart (I trust the actual one is normal sized and I’ve had a full body CT so I think they would have caught any abnormalities) is that I connect deeply, can move people to do incredible things, and can do incredible things when I am inspired to do such.

The downside is that sometimes the house runs away with the spoon, the dragons eat the inhabitants of the countryside, there’s a blizzard in Jerusalem and I decide to become a fighter pilot.

Okay, the fighter pilot thought has never, ever occurred to me. I can’t even parallel park. But you get the idea. Imagination is great, inspiration is powerful, but you gotta bring the bubble down. Because you know what a hot air balloon floating into the air without a plan to bring it down means…

Goats are about to fly.

And you know what they say about things that won’t happen until goats fly…

I can’t seem to download one of the many images on the internet of flying goats, but here are the first flowers I’ve seen this spring.

Thank you, as always, for playing.