Cutting Corners

When does it begin, this business of cutting corners? My first recollection was in 4th grade. I had scribbled the math answers in the textbook before the oral exam. Things got ugly afterwards. So much for shortcuts.

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Along the way, cutting corners becomes habitual. It has a way of searing the conscience, which finally capitulates and rolls over like a dying roach.

The habit is harmless enough in youth. Shortcut paths across a neighbor’s grass are fine, kept at that. But open windows invite youthful curiosity. Voyeurism is a light sleeper. Some learning curves mature best over time.

There’s a bias in human nature that wants to round the corners of life. It lends credence that the earth is round, not square, though possibly triangular. This epiphany dawned on me several years ago while strolling across the commons of an Ivy League campus.

This august university is the progenitor of Progressivism, a mosh pit of Socialist thought. The place literally reeks of money. It boasts the largest number of billionaires in this country. The annual endowment of $36 billion rivals the speaking fees of the Clinton machine. It gives new meaning to their motto, Veritas. Sorry, got off track.

College Commons are typically square plots of grass. They’re designed for a nature experience, but mostly used for smoking and hooking up. What’s peculiar is that they are crisscrossed with triangles. One can only surmise that this particular institution wished to eliminate foot traffic from cutting corners and rutting the greenery. Enough rutting goes on there as it is.

Cutting corners is a sign of something—lazy comes to mind. Sometimes it’s expedient, like poking a thumb-in-the-eye of protocol. Taking shortcuts is not a bad thing necessarily, like slipping out the side door after church to avoid shaking the preacher’s germ-ridden hand.

Politicians, like most lawyers, have perfected the proliferation of shortcuts. No ink on paper avoids jail time and forestalls years of future litigation. Simple pointing, winks and nods are a superior form of writing between the lines. Legal legerdemain, so to speak.

But watch yourself when taking shortcuts with your government. It has sharp elbows and is a vicious machine with a long memory. It consists of tiny square boxes, each with a number and one for everybody. Its intent is to cram us in ours, tighten the screws and watch us squirm.

Its arcane statues are whips. They lash us. Its laws are nooses. They constrain our creative passions. Culture is its diversion, its circus clown. Its dance, its incessant drip, drip, drip of secular values, hypnotizes us. Our very souls swoon, mesmerized by its music of more money.

Conventionality is a death trap, disguised as a king in royal apparel. It’s the don’t-step-out-of-line cultural rebuke to iconoclasts who relish ripping the robes and revealing the Emperor’s nakedness. Individuality threatens vested interests.

Entrenched ideas and bureaucracy are enemies of shortcuts. Grid off the world into harsh corners…but the human spirit will continue to take the hypotenuse route of triangles. Try as any may, the human spirit cannot be defeated. It ever seeks the better way. Cutting corners finds them.

A couple of years ago, at age 72, I decided to take up the violin. My instructions to the teacher were, “Show me the fundamentals. I’ll take it from there.” Rebellious natures die hard.

To her credit, she’s a disciple of ‘the right way’—structured note-reading music. Her method didn’t suit me. Too much effort, not enough time. So I take the shortcut, using my ear for musical creativity. It seems to have worked, although it forever tortures Beethoven’s masterpiece, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

Last Sunday the New York Times printed excerpts from a few college commencement speakers. To a person their message to graduates warned against becoming stereotypical, and to follow their innate passions. Maybe there’s hope yet for more triangles.

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In the end, we each decide which corners to cut, which shortcuts to take, which rounding of the square that suits us.

But no matter how you slice the pie, it’s always a Triangle. Live dangerously, cut corners. But remember, in spite of all our efforts, a shortcut way to heaven has yet to be found. Stay with ‘the right Way.’

Bud Hearn
June 19, 2015