I consider my naivety one of my more prominent superpowers. Of course this amounts to a delusion, but a generally harmless one. I could never believe the wolf would choose to always hang just outside MY door. I learned long ago that tugging sharply upward on my shoelaces could keep a turbulence-rattled jetliner aloft. I do not always expect the best, though I strongly prefer my experience when I manage to expect something other than catastrophe lurking around the next corner.

I seem over-skilled at pre-living my experiences. Before setting foot one onto the threshold of any future, I can imagine scenarios that could easily scare off my own pants from ever entering there. I effortlessly dread, seamlessly scandalize, and easily deflect even the most otherwise innocent engagement; perhaps to keep me safer. In lieu of predicting my future, I sometimes try to stiff-arm it away; as if I could. How terribly naive of me.

Whatever the fantasy about my immediate future, warmly welcoming or coldly threatening, I demonstrate my naivety, seemingly inescapably. On my better days, I retain the choice of which scenario to project ahead of me. I get to choose, sometimes even playfully, whatever future I want to anticipate. Sometimes scathing works best for me. Other times, generosity reigns. Only the quality of my immediate experience hangs in the balance.

Later, sometimes much later, the grand game show host in the sky gets the opportunity to criticize or praise my now-present choice, but it's not like there's a fabulous prize hanging on his decision. I will have forgotten or deeply discounted the naive choice I made at the time by then.

I've suffered a lot of pressure from my more mindful friends who insist that I kind of owe it to myself to be more realistic, though our notions of reality seem to conflict. Where the future's concerned, it seems to me that reality hardly enters into consideration. I see little evidence of the existence of the much-touted self-fulfilling prophesy. I still walk a smidge taller when wearing my lucky underwear. The Secret seems to be that prosperity seems to visit more or less randomly. In between, I consider myself free to imagine whatever I damned well please and not take any consequences all that seriously. Of course, my approach seems the very soul of apostasy to many others.

I figure I live in a kind of bounded infinity, a space reasonably assessed as infinite until it isn't. Both beginning and end essentially indeterminate. Today's gone at about the rate of one minute at a time. Tomorrow arrives much less determinedly. Its nose might stretch beyond the foreseeable, well into the distantly imaginable, without displaying a hint of where its outward edge lies absent my own projections. My naive imaginings define this playing field as essentially infinite in all directions.

Naive cluelessness requires no reinforcement, positive or negative, to sustain itself. I am not studiedly naive, but quite innocently so. I never set out to eradicate or avoid some verifiable knowledge to achieve this state. It might be no more than a gift, but if so, it's a great and wonderful one. Though the whole wide world sometimes seems dedicated to convincing me otherwise, that I really should follow some more knowledgable person's lead, I generally deflect these suggestions. I reserve other areas of my existence for taking such advice. My naivety might be my only native authority. I dance here, as if on the head of a pin bounded by infinity. I need no roadmap to guide me here.

©2017 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #PureSchmaltz #Clueless