Okay, So I Haven't Had Much to Say

Fortunately, Heather King does:

To be a follower of Christ is to accept to hold an almost unbearable amount of tension: to accept bottomless imperfection, brokenness, woundedness; to consent to any number of extremely unpromising people and situations. But this is where things get interesting. I mean we're given all kinds of signs to let us know when we’re onto Him, and almost the first sign is that the Way, the Truth and the Life are interesting. You start to change; that’s interesting. You forgive someone you thought it was impossible to forgive; that’s interesting. The MOST unpromising person, or situation, the seeming catastrophe, turns out in the end to have helped you along in some way you could never have imagined on your own: that’s interesting. You forego a slew of money and security in order to pursue work you’re passionate about: that’s interesting.

. . . 

But we do not come as people who strive for efficiency, for results, to swagger and preen and lord it over the rest of the world. We come as sinners. We come as beggars. We come hungering and thirsting. We come: the lame, the blind, the deaf, the halt, the leprous, the demoniacs, the desperate, the lost, the lonely. We don’t have our political views to give each other; we have Christ. We don’t have convincing arguments; we have our wounds, our holy longing, our groping in the dark. We don't have clever op-eds; we have our bodies, our puny love, our lurching, guaranteed-to-fall-short striving for purity.

And I’m not sure I have ever felt so close to the heart of reality, so certain of my seemingly utterly ineffective and irrelevant faith, so proud to be a member of the human race as I was that afternoon, standing in line with my brothers in Christ--aching, hoping, against all odds trusting--at that dingy church. If I did not believe that to stand in line at that confessional was in some sense saving the world, I would blow my brains out. Because to believe that is to believe in the Resurrection. And if Christ did not live, if he did not vanquish death, there would be no reason, no possible way to go on.

You must read the rest of this stunning essay. 

Me, I'm keeping my mouth shut and my ears open, as much as I can possibly manage.

Monday

At the table in the dusky kitchen, watching the sky come to life above the gable of the gray house next door. An instant ago I was thinking about the solid grayness of the house;  I'd have called the sky gray, too, if the house weren't touching it. The house is gray. What to call the sky?

This thought came and went in far less time than it took me to write it down. In that time the sky changed from not-gray to not-gray-marbled-with-pink. Now the pink's gone again, and the sky again is not a color, exactly -- not gray -- but a filling-with-light.

The maple outside the window is budding. The cape jessamine's a burning tangle by the road. These are the kinds of thoughts I'm used to having in the middle of Lent:  beauty, or the promise of it, in the midst of austerity. It's disorienting somehow not to frame this season with penance. Where did my checks and balances go? You mean to tell me I just get given this?

Flanders/Swann/Wordsworth Allusion Located!

Wouldn't you know, it's on the bus. No wonder I had trouble tracking it down.

Go on, be transported. (and then you can watch this)

Oh My

I'm sitting on my front porch watching a pair of Carolina bluebirds check out my holly tree. I've never seen a live specimen of this bird before;  really, the dusty taxidermy in our local natural-history museum does not do them justice. A blue so blue . . . like the sky today, only more so.

Time to put  up a nesting box. And alert the Great Backyard Bird Count, too.

Styling, Baby

In an "Undeserved Honor of the Year" moment, I've been given a blog award:

My thanks to Megan, of Daughter of Mary, for making my day.

Now, as readers of any duration here will know, I don't . . . um . . .  actually read blogs that much. I guess that's a terrible admission:  here you are, reading whatever I happen to bang out on a given day, and do I reciprocate? Well, if I happen to read my sitemeter, which I don't do nearly as much as I used to, because it was a habit I wanted to break, I'll click on the links of referring blogs, because I'm curious to see who's reading. And if you comment here, and your name appears in blue, as a hyperlink:  yep, I'll click. I want to know who you are.

Otherwise? Not so much, I'm afraid. It's not that I don't love you, a specious line if ever there were one.  As a woman I knew long ago once remarked of her soon-to-be-ex-husband, "It's not that I don't love him. I just can't stand anything he does." So maybe we should scratch that thought. 

Also, though the blogs I do read, some of which are new, are the kinds of blogs I'd give awards to, they don't really fit the "stylish" profile. For one thing, the two which come to mind immediately as new discoveries are written by men, and while they do have a certain style . . . well, you go check out the resurrected Strange Herring and then tell me what you think. I mean, I'm turning cartwheels over Anthony's reappearance, but somehow . . .

And then there's the news-digest blog Optimistic Pessimist, written by a person whom I happen to know and love, in a personal face-to-face kind of way, as if he were my own child, so to speak. My instinct is that a person who gets up at six in the morning to listen to the BBC World Service and then follow the live-blogging at Al-Jazeera does not really want to be known as "stylish." Even though he is, insofar as Boy-Scout t-shirts are stylish. On the other hand, I figure he might appreciate the recognition. And if you happened to think that this person is making an A in "current events," you would be right.

What I think is that the Optimistic Pessimist ought to invent some kind of weird-news-addict guy award -- not to be confused with the genre of the weird news-addict-guy award (the hyphen is everything, my children!) -- and give it to Strange Herring. Or vice versa. I dunno.

Meanwhile, of course, there are the poetry blogs I read.  They aren't new, but since it took me approximately two years to tumble to how the Poetry-Friday thing works, they are new to me. Actually, I found Maria Horvath's gorgeous art-and-poetry blog via a comment at the First Things website, but I do have PoFri to thank for introducing me to  Toby Speed at The Writer's Armchair.

Penultimately, my reader includes several blogs which I guess would qualify as mom-blogs, though each in its own way transcends the general level of "let me tell you about my day;  and please click on one of the many, many ads in my sidebar" which characterizes much of this genre.

Lissla Lissar's Blog, for instance, captures a sense of everydayness-with-small-children in prose which is economical, even minimalist, and wryly self-deprecating, while Young Mom at Permission to Live  writes compellingly and often painfully about coming to terms with her past. I read more than I comment at both these blogs;  though it's been only seven years since I last had a baby and a toddler, somehow that experience now seems unspeakably remote, and I feel like Elizabeth going to visit Mary, loaded with sage advice which she probably doesn't want or need. The Visitation in reverse would need to be largely an exercise in circumspection, I can't help thinking.

Finally, I enjoy Dorian Speed no end. Her "quick take" on the naming of subdivisions -- "THE VISTA at Synergy. LEVERAGE Oaks" -- cracked me up over my coffee this morning.

So, well, I think that's seven. And now, back to reality, in which everyone in the house is sick, including me, cough hack shiver. Crispina has been tending to Helier, who's having one of his asthma spells;  just this minute she announced that she is a "sick nurse -- a nurse who doesn't feel so well."

We were supposed to drive to Maryland tomorrow to look at a college, but given that we're all sick and that the prospective student does not want to go, either, at all, this may end up being a strike. The more I think about it, the more I think that really, whatever the student in question does with the next four years of her life, she's not going to spend it saying to herself, "Oh, if only I had gone to look at X. U."

Speaking of poetry blogs, I meant to mention, again, my friend Sarah's blog Long Live the Weeds.   She's got some Wordsworth up right now which, among other things, reminds me how brilliantly allusive Flanders and Swann were . . . though I cannot now remember which song and/or monologue contained the line "Earth has not anything to show more fair," which just goes to show you that some of us aren't. Yet you read us anyway. 

Over and out and off to steam my head again. And thanks again to Megan for cheering me up.

Overheard (By Aelred) in the Grocery Checkout Line

Customer to Pleasant Elderly Early-Morning Cashier, on receipt of forty-seven-cent-off on fuel perks:

"You're a cotton-pickin' princess."


And no, that's not a typo. What people say around here is "forty-seven-cent-off." The number is plural, the cent is singular.

Frugal Friday Frolic

Child in my house, addressing the cosmos (addendum:  as in the universe, not as in the flowers):  

 Instead of something that's on sale, why can't we ever buy something that's just for sale?

Have I Told You Lately That I Love

These dudes?



Well,  I do. And here's more, from the same show:

Bread and Circuses

OK, if ever there were a yawner of a predictable title for a piece about a circus, I've just written it. Right up there with saying, in a Greek class, "That's Greek to me," and then looking around to see if there's anyone left in America who hasn't heard that one yet and might be moved to laugh.

And anyway, it's more like "cotton candy and nachos and circuses." Or, to quote the various announcers a the circus I went to this afternoon with Helier and Crispina, "yummy yummy good for your tummy, light and fluffy not-too-stuffy cotton candy! And cheeeeeeeeesy nachos!"

Admission to this circus was only three dollars, and for every paying adult two children under fourteen got in free, so you can see why they were pushing the concessions. For the aforementioned yummy yummy, etc. cotton candy and cheeeeeeeeeesy nachos we paid exactly twice what we paid to get in. Still, ninety minutes of passable entertainment, with snacks, for three dollars a head seems not too shabby a deal.

We went because -- actually, I can't remember how it started, except that suddenly, in the middle of last week, after talking to some kid in his Cub Scout den, Helier began to ask to go to the circus. In fact, he not only asked, but he also subscribed, in full confidence, to the theory of the self-fulfilling prophecy. "Boy, I can't wait to go to that circus," he kept remarking.

Circus? I said.

"Oh, yeah. There's a circus coming to town next Monday. I can't wait to go to it."

And lo, after a day or two of this, I saw a flyer on a shop window in town. Circus, it said. American Legion Hall. INDOORS. Can't beat indoors, I thought. And so we went.

I wasn't sure where the American Legion Hall was, exactly, but I need not have worried:  from the square, all we had to do was to follow a series of handpainted signs bearing the message Circus Here Today, with arrows to indicate that the circus was not literally right there, but at some here further on. And then in front of the American Legion Hall, another sign with an arrow indicating HERE! RIGHT HERE! TURN NOW! 

We arrived early, wanting to be sure we got in, you know. Again, we might have saved ourselves the trouble:   we were so early that when I asked the girl running the concessions table for a box of popcorn, she looked at me funny and said, nodding at the neat row of boxes behind her, that those were from yesterday and were going into the trash. O-kay, I said. Never mind. Later on the smell of fresh popcorn did come wafting into the hall, so obviously the plan had been to offer popcorn eventually, just not to people who wanted it an hour before showtime.

We found seats -- we found lots of seats. For the longest time, the only other people occupying the bleachers on our side of the hall were two hardbitten women accompanying a very small girl. One looked old to be the mother of a child that young;  the other just looked old. She had an incongruously youthful-looking head of flaxen hair, swept back from her face with a plastic headbad, and no teeth. They bought the little girl a light-up plastic fairy wand and an enormous bag of blue cotton candy, which the old-old woman stuck, in wads, to all the fingers of one hand, then sucked off and masticated with evident delight. I tried not to be transfixed by this process, but I was.

To keep myself from watching the old woman and her cotton candy, I studied my surroundings. From the ceiling, I noticed, depended a series of ceiling fans exactly like the ones that had come with our old house:  central light in a frosted-and-etched-glass globe, little lights in flower-shaped glass shades in a kind of gesticulating halo around it. In the center, over a single inflatable ring like a child's large wading pool, hung a disco ball. I'm still not sure whether it was part of the circus, or whether it's simply always there. They never turned out the ceiling-fan lights, so that the effects of the stage lighting they'd set up were somewhat muted, and if they'd had a strobe thing going on, nobody was any the wiser.

The circus itself was composed of about seven people, who all appeared to belong to one Spanish-speaking family. The same people kept appearing in various acts -- Balancing Dude! The Girl Who Can Spin a Hundred Hula Hoops! Elastigirl! Nine-year-old Comedian ("Nooooo, nooooo, nooooo. It's just a joke.")! And More! -- and being announced as having come direct from Venezuela! and then all the way from Mexico City! and then from . . . uh . . . Spain! and finally by special request, from the Cherokee Nation! This last was an act involving crossbows and balloons. I'd been alarmed, a little, by the crossbows, in a space only just larger than my living room, but nobody was hurt, including the matriarch of the family who danced around in tights and a loincloth, with many triumphant flourishes of the fingers, having had a balloon shot off the top of her head. At one point a little dog ran out from backstage and hid himself under the bleachers;  we kept expecting him to appear in some act, but he vanished away while our attention was otherwise engaged, and we never saw him again.

I confess that I found it hard to summon up the energy for enthusiastic applause, but Helier has declared, in the infallible, ex cathedra way that he has sometimes, that this was the best circus he has ever seen in his life, so I guess that settles it.

The Official Not-Watching-the-Superbowl Sunday Post

Uh, well, I mean, we're not.

If it's still on.

Is it over yet?

Who won?

Who was playing, again? Detroit or something?

Nice day out.

And stuff.

Poetry Friday: The Traveling Spirit

For once my Poetry Friday offering actually coordinates, thematically speaking, with what's going on in the wider PoFri world. Today our hostess, Doraine at Dori Reads, is offering a selection of poems which speak to the impulse for exploration. By happy coincidence, this week both Helier and Crispina have been copying poems about the yearning to go. I posted Crispina's Millay poem as part of my teaching-reading discussion;  here is Helier's, which we've both fallen in love with:

A Ship for Singapore

A ship is sailing for Singapore!
O heart be swift and latch the door!

My fire burns bright and the shadows fall
In yellow rhythms along the wall.
My love sleeps near and her dreams are deep,
Her lips a rose that has fallen asleep.
The fire burns bright and the candles glow,
And I must not go -- I must not go!

There is no peace I can know to-night
Though my love sleeps near and the fire burns bright,
For stars will call from an Indian sky
And a gold moon haunt me blowing by.
The sea's wild horses will leap and fly,
Foam on their manes and wind in their eye!

O heart be swift and latch the door --
A ship is sailing for Singapore!

Daniel Whitehead Hicky, from All the Silver Pennies

I've owned All the Silver Pennies since I was about six, but I don't remember ever reading this poem before last Monday, when I was paging through looking for things for people to copy. And this is marvelous:  the shadows falling "in yellow rhythms along the wall," the "sea's wild horses" with "foam on their manes and wind in their eye." Rather to my surprise, my 8-year-old boy reader has not found the "my love" business yack-making -- he gets that the speaker longs to be someplace else, having an adventure. Meanwhile, the sounds are so satisfying to say aloud that really the speaker could say anything, and we would buy it.

On Teaching Reading

An excellent installment up this morning in the "Four Mom/35 kids" series currently running at The Common Room:

Great books and the spoken word are the foundation, and this starts when the children are still very small.  I am one of those nuts who reads to babies in the womb, and I have been known to read Plutarch and Shakespeare to infants too small to defend themselves.

. . .

We do not read dumbed down retellings of great classics- Those horrible Great Illustrated Classics are not for us- except as an object lesson in a talk I've given a couple of times on how bad they are.We do not read twaddle.  I am not interested in Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer or other books that tie in to television shows or theme parks (no Disney books.  Ew.).  Yes, I am a snob about this, if it's being a snob to prefer to feed my children bread instead of stones.

Over and over again, the teaching of reading is a mystery to me, and I wish I did it as schematically as the DHM does, mostly because her schemes are creative and fun. For my own part, I've seen three (so far) of my progeny learn to read by processes largely independent of my efforts.

Epiphany went to school at five and six, in a system where everyone else had started at four, so that she was behind before she even got going properly. I still remember that transition:  one day you're in preschool learning to make good choices and stay out of the bad-choice chair, and the next day you're on the other side of the Atlantic studying for a spelling test, despite the fact that you neither read nor write. That was interesting, but by Christmas she was doing both. What she read in school was pretty twaddly, though that hasn't handicapped her in the long run. Of course, at home we were reading the good stuff, so that the teachers thanked us at every parent-teacher conference for sending her to school already equipped with learning, which was why eventually we began to wonder why exactly we were arranging our lives around this middleman. But I digress.

Amicus received a smattering of phonics in the one year he went to school -- he did start full-time at age four like everyone else and spent the year, as he now says, "writing 'curly kuhs,'" ie the letter c, and watching the teacher mix it up with a kid named Storm.  When we moved back to the U.S. and began homeschooling, I continued the "smattering of phonics" approach, but as we were new at homeschooling and still reeling from the effects of a transatlantic move, joblessness, and life with two school-aged children (at least one of them seriously unhappy about the move), a manic toddler, and a newborn in an apartment, you will understand that when I say "smattering," I mean, really, smattering, as in a few random drops of ineffectual rain on drought-stricken earth.

 We did, however, go to the library a lot. I was too tired and overwhelmed to care much what people checked out, and what Amicus wanted were books on military themes, so as I have said before, we took home a book called Amphibious Techniques roughly eight thousand times that year, and he spent hours poring over the pictures. One day he came to me and shamefacedly confessed that he was "only reading the captions" to these pictures. As each caption was a paragraph in itself, and the book really wasn't in any way aimed at six-year-olds, I was taken aback. Oh, you can read? And that was that. His favorite book at age nine was Sun Tsu's The Art of War (see a theme developing here?), and this year he's read Beowulf (the Seamus Heaney translation, because that's what we have), and most of the Stephen "Band of Brothers" Ambrose oeuvre, and a shorter work by Stephen Hawking, so whatever it was I did or didn't do seems to have worked all right.

 I also can't remember how Helier learned to read. When he was four and five and six, I again tried the phonics approach, with smattering -- at some point I did acquire a set of plastic word tiles, and one of our favorite games (his and mine and Crispina's) was making up goofy sentences and reading them, but again, actual reading was a matter of a switch flipping. One day he didn't want to read;  the next day he wanted to read the entire Redwall series, all four million books of it, in one 24-hour period. Right now he's reading R. L. Stevenson's The Black Arrow. If someone had told me two years ago that this child would sit still on a couch for an entire morning with a book in his hands, I would not have believed it. But there it is.

 With Crispina, meanwhile, we're still in process. I can actually recall what methods I've been using, because I haven't had a chance to forget them yet. We've moved from our set of super-basic phonics readers to two books between which we alternate:  a nature reader called Seaside and Wayside, from Lepanto press (original copyright circa 1911), and Book One of the American Cardinal Reader series used in Catholic schools of the early 1930s. For roughly ten minutes every day we "buddy-read" from one of these books. She reads a paragraph, then I read a paragraph, and we take turns reading aloud through the entire lesson or chapter or story. We're still informally doing phonics as we run up against words which make us stumble:  mistakes offer the opportunity to review basic rules and to look at families of words (currently we're struggling with -igh words, like night, light, bright, fight), and I think I'll use copywork to help her memorize these. She's reading pretty fluently at this point, handling dialogue and complex sentences largely with ease -- one of the things I love about these old books is that the sentences are complicated and elegant, as if children were actually capable of digesting good prose.

 We also practice reading via copywork -- this is largely how we "do" poetry. I give her one to two lines a day, Helier two to four. She's currently copying this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

 Travel

The railroad track is miles away,
   And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn't a train goes by all day
    But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn't a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
   And I hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with the friends I make,
   And better friends I'll not being knowing,
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
   No matter where it's going.

(from one of my own childhood books, All the Silver Pennies)

All right, this very child has appeared at my side to beg me to get her blueberries for breakfast. After that, we'll do some math and *reading* before heading out for our day at church.

Later, all.

What We're Reading

As far as I know, anyway:

Aelred:  at this moment, student quizzes. So far we have learned that "Hellenistic" means "of hell and/or the devil."

Me:  Barbara Pym's "autobiography in letters and diaries," again. Plus everything I'm reading aloud to younger people:  Bible stories, The Long Winter, and The World in a Drop of Water, by Alvin and Virginia Silverstein. Helier now wants to be an amoeba. Crispina has had enough, already, of being engulfed by pseudo-pseudopodia. 

Epiphany:  Laurence Perrine's Sound and Sense. Other than that, I'm not sure, unless she's still reading Barbara Pym, too.

Amicus:  Well, I'm really embarrassed to admit this, because the book he's reading is one which a friend left at our house -- a library book, no less -- which I've been supposed to send back for days now. It is A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe:  The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science, by Michael S. Schneider. VA, I promise, it'll go in the post tomorrow. And we're sorry about the fines. I'll send it an extra-expensive fast way, so we'll all break even.


Helier:  The Black Arrow, by Robert Louis Stevenson. We'd read it aloud last year, and he wanted it again. I said, "Well, read it to yourself, then." So that's what consumed most of his day.

Crispina: is the one person left in the house who can't quite pick up a book like The Black Arrow and while away the hours. Once again I am struck by the difficulty of being the lone person who can read, but not quite confidently enough to navigate the math instructions alone. Actually, to be honest, what I'm struck with is the difficulty of being the adult who still has to be patient with the person who can read, but not quite confidently enough &c. yada yada. But, well, in the great scheme of things that's a tiny little pathetic cross to be complaining about.

And she can read. She is reading, alternately, the Lepanto Press Seaside and Wayside nature reader, which means that we are learning more than we ever wanted to know about Mr. and Mrs. Crab (up next:  the Wasp Family);  and the American Cardinal Reader, Book One. Being past the Primer stage is exciting, in and of itself, and I at any rate can almost taste the day when she, too, spends hours curled up on the study couch with a book.

 

On Being Not Afraid

Well, all right, I'm being a little afraid about math right now, I'll admit. I'm not quite sure why:  one kid is going to college, one kid is making an A in pre-algebra (not my genes, baby), and the other two are in second and first grades. The second grader can look at a word problem and solve it in his head;  the first grader . . . seems to be taking after me, which is why, 2/3 of the way through first grade we're still drilling basic addition, because I have seen what happens to, say, a ninth grader who has spent the years when she was six and seven coloring in patterns and identifying pictures as greater-than/less-than sentences and completing drawings of pine trees to demonstrate symmetry and occasionally, every fifty exercises or so, doing about ten random addition sums.

As homeschoolers, we're flaky and arty about lots of things, all Charlotte-Un-Mason-Schooling-Literature-Based-Creativity-Gardening-La-La, but when it comes to math I am realizing, once again, that the Trivium is right, and that  if we don't know our basic facts, we're lost, which really does settle my largely-unnecessary self-questioning about math curriculum. MCP Math is not exciting, but it's thorough for the early grades, and when Helier finishes his current book we're going to Saxon 5/4, and that is that. I don't know why I have to have these little breakdowns, but in any event, I think I'm better now.

Oh, but we have also discovered IXL Math, which is not exactly a free online resource, but worth the monthly subscription right now.  My kids are doing, on average, an extra hour/100 problems a day in various grade-level skill areas, but they think they're playing games. This to me is as a return to the gold standard.

Meanwhile, my friend David Mills at First Things has his finger on the pulse of parental anxiety:  the hovering, the protectiveness, the impulse to load a kid up so heavily with helmets and pads and shields that he can't climb onto the bike, let alone fall off it.

It's tempting, of course, to point fingers at those helicopter parents with all the fears. In writing an essay which begins with the admission that his family has a backyard trampoline, David has freed any number of other parents to admit, as in a support group, that, no, we don't make our kids wear helmets, and we do let them climb trees, and we practice the kind of benign neglect which in our own childhoods was simply normal, but which now might be construed as child abuse. This is the way the comments run, at any rate.

But there's a subtler and larger fear which plagues even the most free-range of parents, if they're invested at all in their children's futures. I've known it myself, in the form of "I Thought Homeschooling Was the Right Decision, But What If My Child Doesn't Get Accepted to Any College, and It Turns Out That I've Ruined Her Life?" As David writes,

I had not seen how hopes quickly become fears, and how the deepest hopes become the worst fears, and how the fallen heart can manufacture reasons to be afraid even from blessings, like education. You might believe, sincerely, when your child is eight or ten that the only education you want for him is one that will teach him what he needs to know about literature and art and history, which can be provided at any number of schools, including the cheap and unknown ones.

. . .

Suddenly you fear that your child will only get into the obscure college and his life will be ruined, or at least that he will always have to struggle and will never be able to do what he could. You may know that this feeling is foolish, but knowing that you are being foolish does not make you any the less anxious. Suddenly you’re as neurotic and fearful and driving as the yuppie parents you used to look down upon.

But here's the germ of the essay, the antidote to fear:  repeating to yourself, Be Not Afraid. If that sounds a little platitudinous . . . well, you're not alone in thinking so:

I didn’t pay much attention when John Paul II was elected, nor to his first sermon as pope, but some years later when I first came across his declaration “Be not afraid,” I thought it a pretty lame declaration with which to start one’s work. It seemed to me a platitude like “brush between meals” and “eat more fiber,” not a call to arms. Yeah, sure, whatever, I thought. Biblical slogans are a dime a dozen.

Still and all, it's what our Lord says, and it's not a suggestion, but an imperative. For my part, I'm going to go forward -- boldly -- today and do some math drill, and let the rest of the future take care of itself.