"Avoid Christening New Boats"

Long ago, when I was 21 or 22 and taking a cross-country train ride at the behest of the military, I talked for a while with a Catholic priest who couldn't have been much older than I was.

He asked me what I wanted to do with my life, after the Air Force. I told him I had great ambitions of being a writer, a la Hemingway and Fitzgerald. (This was before Hemingway shot himself and before I knew about Fitzgerald getting stretched flat by booze.)

Without hesitation the priest said quite tersely (and this is an exact quote), "Many people will reject you."

I was certain that I knew just what he meant. He was referring to my skin color, though he could also have had in mind my non-dynamic personality, which may have been clearly noticeable even in just those several moments.

I thought, and have thought many times since then, that his saying that had been unnecessary in the extreme, and that it showed that he was not going to be a very good priest.

I can't ever know how my prophecy turned out, but I have to concede that his prediction worked out largely as he had stated it -- not in every or even in most respects but certainly when it came to my literary ambitions.

But that has never caused me to lose any sleep. It is possible to put quite a few serviceable words to paper even without the cheers of the crowd.

I was reminded of that priest's prognosis for me by a film that I saw a few days ago, called "The Ashes of Time Redux." I'm guessing that it was largely made by West Coast Chinese-American film-makers. Netflix gave the impression that it was a martial arts film, though the swordfights were just blurs of motion, shapes, sounds, and colors and were there mainly to fill in between the much longer sequences of what the makers really had in mind, which was Chinesey moods and Chinesey pithy sayings mixed in with advice from ancient almanacs.

My favorite warning from the ancient almanacs was, "Avoid christening new boats."

Can it be that it is precisely our relative lack of new boats that makes it so hard for us to know what to do with our days?

But also one of those pithy sayings ran, "The best way to deal with rejection is to reject others first."

Now I have to decide if that has been my strategy all along, dating from long before I took that cross-country train ride.

I don't know how I could ever be sure. There could have been many other factors on my part that could have played key roles, including inborn indifferences of various kinds.