The Human Condition

I’m a great reader of quotations by people from all walks: the famous, the infamous, and the unknown. Winston Churchill said, “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” I am not exactly uneducated, but I am a slow reader, so, rather than spending my time reading whole biographies to learn about great people (which I’d like to do), I often instead read collections of quotations.

There is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from famous quotations, and they give you the measure of the person without having to muck about in their everyday lives. Of course, there’s much to be learned about people’s true character by mucking about in their everyday lives, so I don’t at all discount that aspect of reading biographies.

My favorite quotes, as well as aphorisms, axioms and adages, are those that pretty much sum up the human condition. There are lots of great sayings out there, of course, including many that can improve our health, our parenting, our perspective, our character, and every other aspect of our lives. But the ones I like best are the ones that sum up human nature or the human condition in a nutshell.

I think that my all-time favorite quote, though, about the human condition, came from someone who is not famous, and I won’t make him famous because, to be quite frank, I’ve long since forgotten his name.

He was an old farmer living somewhere in the hinterlands of Houston, Texas. Houston and the flatlands around it are prone to flooding every time there comes a big gullywasher (as we call them here in the hills of east Tennessee). Being from the hills–where water drains very rapidly during storms, what with its always wanting to go downhill–I never imagined what water could do in flat country. It just piles up and sits there. Which I learned about during my brief stint in Houston.

So, we’d had days or perhaps weeks of rain and flooding, and the water was encroaching slowly from the lowest spots toward the higher spots. Folks in surrounding low-lying counties were sandbagging like mad, trying to stay ahead of the water and keep home and hearth dry.

On the local news one evening, they showed an aerial view of a farm that was completely surrounded by water. Only the house and the barn were still on dry land, and that was thanks to a very good job of sandbagging done by the farmer and his family. However, the water continued to rise, and the news reporter asked the farmer whether he was going to hold out and do more sandbagging or whether he was going to evacuate, along with his neighbors, when the local constabulary came calling.

He said, “I just don’t know. If I knew what was going to happen, I’d know what to do. But I don’t know what’s going to happen, so I don’t know what to do.”

Well, there you have it. About as succinct a summation of the human condition as I can imagine. He was quite serious, of course. This was no time for fooling around or being cute. He was looking at possibly losing everything that he and his family had worked for, probably for generations. So, he was not just idly philosophizing. This was human-condition examination of the most important kind. This was where the rubber meets the road.

I think of that old farmer all the time. Every time I come to a crossroads in my life, where I have to make a pretty important decision that, it seems, will shape the rest of my life, my mind brings back the words of the old farmer. If only I knew what was going to happen, I’d know what to do. But I must muddle through, just like everyone else, not knowing what the outcome will be till it’s too late to change my decision.