April 1st is called April Fool’s Day for a reason. I have proved this many times over. And it’s not just April 1st. It’s the whole month. For example, the common stove. This can be a very dangerous machine, if you haven’t noticed. Recently I was in my normal (daily) cooking mode when strange things began to happen. I took a tray of buns out of the oven and happened to reach for a thinner hot pad, rather than the usual thicker one. Consequently, the heat transferred immediately to my right (grabber) hand which then tilted to the left. My left hand (no pad) then, reflexively, steadied the pan to prevent a spill and lift the pan to the top of the stove which, I had forgotten, was almost covered with uneven pots and pans busily cooking various foods. So, while toasting my left hand, I turned and dropped the buns on the only small space open on the counter top. Simultaneously, one of the other pans on top of the stove started boiling over, so I scooted it to the back burner, which caused the hairs on my right hand to be burnt, causing that unpleasant smell that should never be in a kitchen. Unfortunately, as I scooted the one pan, it nudged another pan, causing it to spill some of its contents on the top of the stove and onto the floor. This caused another unpleasant burning smell not uncommon to kitchens, but still unwelcome. All of this was compounded when one of our cats nonchalantly brushed by my legs and distracted me from the smells and the spills. This caused me to move enough to step into the spill on the floor, and while slipping… I sneezed.
None of this is possible under normal circumstances, but, it was an April Fool’s Day, and, you guessed it… I was “it.” I was the the fool or the joker or the butt of some kind of cosmic joke. I didn’t know what hit me! Cooking is not supposed to be “life threatening!” And this is just the stove we are talking about. What if you were playing in a symphony orchestra, or dancing on a stage, or driving on a freeway, or on a roller coaster or a waterslide, or on a boat to Catalina, or just taking a nap? The possibilities boggle the mind. And this is normal everyday living, not an earthquake or a tornado. Things like this are not supposed to happen under normal circumstances. But, April, obviously, is not a normal month.
I suppose we all can look to the other eleven months for normalcy if we must, but we are probably still fooling ourselves into another false belief. That life is normal.
Life is NOT normal under any set of circumstances. We go to great lengths to prove that it is, but we are just wasting our time. It will never be. We all make plans. We map out routes, schedules, routines, and projections, but there is always something little that gets in the way. Roadwork, sickness (ours or someone else’s), and at least a zillion other possibilities that are lurking in the shadows, to appear when you least expect them. What April teaches us is to embrace these unexpected circumstances. To expect them and even try to enjoy them, or at least to see the humor that is usually present if you look for it.
When you really think of it, MUSIC itself is not normal. Frequencies happily flow at certain levels and rates without interruption until something gets in their way. And that something, or someone, is usually the musician. We have taken frequencies and divided them into arbitrary increments. We have then made them do weird and unnatural things to reflect our own moods. We collect batches of them and isolate them into tracks, and the tracks into various sized collections. The infinite possibilities built into these frequencies have now been pared down and squished into a fraction of what they were just so we can understand them and deal with them on a daily basis. This has become normal for us.
We have done the same thing with our universe, both macro and micro. Everything is compared to our earth, which is not even a quantum of a fraction of the known universe just so we can try to understand it and also manipulate it. We also do the same thing with our Creator (but I refuse to go there)…! So what is our conclusion? That we are constantly “April Fooling” ourselves just to get a handle on enough things to be able to make it through our lives. Not bad! It seems to work. But is it normal…?