I love it when I remember my dreams. My strangest ones seem to occur when I am at the beach. I’m not sure why. Last year I dreamed I was Phil Bredesen’s (Tennessee’s governor) social double, kind of like Dave in the movie. I really like that movie, by the way. In my dream, having forgotten what Gov. Bredesen actually looks like, for some reason my mind decided that I/he would look just like Donald Trump. It was great.

This year I dreamed I was in this place that turned out to be an underground orphanage/prison. One of my former professors, Harmon Wray, was in this one. He was quite the hell raiser before he died, not in in the sense you might think though. He hated institutions, especially prisons, and he was never short on words to describe his displeasure. In the dream, though, as he and I were trapped inside his least favorite place, he began to sing (for you Bible scholars, there’s a reference here). This prompted, of course, an earthquake, and it just gets out of hand from there…

I had a strange dream last night about someone close to me dying. I was with her when it happened, and she went very peacefully. She was in her favorite place at the time: the beach. It’s my favorite place too. There was no ambulance ride, no frantic trip to the emergency room. No one tried to revive her. We all knew it was just her time to go, and so we let her go, peacefully and without interruption.

This reminds me of a remarkably poignant (and thank you Mr. Kadison for realizing that meaning can be conveyed in brevity) book: Seventeen Ways to Eat a Mango. I like the small books with the profound lessons. A favorite (and often hostile) professor of mine once began a sentence thus: “You know how some essays are four pages and four pages too long…” Get to the point. So I will.

I’m not one of those people who believes that everything in life happens for some divinely inspired reason. That is not to say I believe life is random either. I have seen too many coincidences to believe that is plausible.

So, I am not likely to encourage people to blame their fortunes or failings on divine intervention. But I am also disinclined to push people either toward or away from their goals. If you want something, I believe you should go for it (unless, of course, that something belongs to your neighbor. It always does, by the way, but that is another story.).

Several years ago I found myself in Missoula, Montana, floating the Blackfoot River. I quickly learned that floating, also called “tubing,” is much different than rafting. When you go rafting, you take a paddle with you because you want to control your raft. The joy of floating is letting the river do the work for you. Applying sunscreen and opening beer cans should be one’s most difficult tasks.

Having rafted several times before and never having seen this river, however, I was disinclined to trust it. Many times I tried to help it guide me through its forks and down its currents. For my efforts I often lost my group (ahead of me) and occasionally fell off my tube. My back was sore for days. As the day wound down, I realized that my efforts hadn’t done me a damn bit of good. I ended up in the same place as everyone else. It turns out that the river wasn’t my enemy after all.

I think life is a lot like that. I’m not saying we shouldn’t ever make an effort toward anything. I just think we should change our perspective a little bit. Fighting who we are won’t change us. Things will just hurt more, and it will take a little longer to reach our destination. We are who we are, good, bad, and indifferent.

I, for example, am extremely disorganized which is why I’m not even going to try to make a proper segue into what this has to do with my friend’s death on the beach. It’s about control, okay? We don’t have it, so we should stop trying to dictate our own circumstances.