The Ossified Bone

 

Ossification: The process of hardening into bone or a state of being molded into a rigid, conventional, sterile or unimaginative condition.   Webster

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What you’re looking at above appears to be a fossilized leg bone of some long-departed creature. I picked it up while walking our hound dog on the beach. It lay silently in a boneyard of blanched shells and other encrusted castoffs that nature scatters along the shore. I felt like a grave robber.

I scrape the loose sand off. Maybe there’s a message in the bone. It is Sunday, after all, a day for messages, messages to remind backsliders that church still exists despite Covid.  

The word ‘ossified’ immediately comes to mind. How about that for a message? Never give up on the Spirit. Who else could take an ossified bone and render a message?

Today’s beach is empty. No dogs, no walkers, just Bogey and me. He does a lot of sniffing in the edge of the dunes; I do a lot of thinking about the bone in my hand. I look at it, ask, “What have you to say to me today?”  It whispers, “Listen closely.”

Funny, how something multiplies itself while stewing in its own juices. Probably how Kafka come up with the idea of Gregor Samsa waking up and discovering he was a giant insect. Writing naked can do this. But today I keep my shorts on and continue walking and thinking.

Ossification can take many forms. ‘Os’ means bone in Latin, and can be used also in a figurative sense, like something or some concept becoming fixed or rigid. Take opinions, or experiences, for example. We all have them. Kept rigid enough they become a mold of belief that can ossify. Once beliefs petrify, it takes a sledgehammer to break up their concrete foundations.

I had a friend once. Name was Jack. I say once, because he’s no longer among us, RIP.  He was smart, a successful developer. But when the tide of recession ebbed, it revealed him swimming naked in debt. He suffered PTSD after that.

I visited him once. Taped on his desk was a yellow laminated paper. I remember how the conversation went:

“Say, Jack, what’s that taped to your desk?”

“My new investment rules.”

“Looks like a big list of ‘thou shall nots.’

“Right. I made a list of everything that can go wrong in development. Now I never make an investment without complying with these rules. Keeps me out of trouble.”

“Can it eliminate the risks inherent in every deal?”

“Yes. It’s iron clad. I haven’t been in trouble since I made the list.”

“Have you made any new investments?”

“Not yet, the list keeps me safe.”

I left feeling sorry for him. He was safe, yes, but he had ossified and imprisoned his spirit into a solidified and inviolate list of ‘don’t do’s that left no room for serendipity that life has to offer. He never made another deal.

We often get ‘fixed in our ways,’ ignoring any contrary opinions. It’s human nature. Such was the case with two other friends, Bob and George, who were partners. They had put together five-year and ten-year business plans, nothing left to chance. Every move like a chess game, calculated down to the nuance. No other opinions mattered.

I ran into George one day. He looked down and out. I asked how things were going. He just shook his head and said, “Things were great till Bob up and died. Blew up all our plans.”  Such can happen when plans become ossified without calculating on the vicissitudes of nature.

Today both inside and outside DC and the Beltway lines are being drawn, heels are being dug in, opinions are becoming entrenched. Politics roil and boil, dictates. mandates, off-the-wall philosophies and ideologies, doctrines, propaganda and new-deal orthodoxies like missiles are hurled at the ossified walls of status quo.    

We’re not immune. Lest we become smug within ourselves, remember, we all have peculiar affinities that can ossify and harden into impenetrable walls faster than a brick can shatter the shuttered window of every secret sin. Keep the stones handy. You may need them.

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So ends the bone’s message. Today I return it to its seaside boneyard where Nature will resume its inexorable process of scattering the bone’s desiccated remains back into the sand from whence it was taken. 

Beware, ossification happens. Avoid it. Keep breaking up your fallow ground and live boldly.

 

 Bud Hearn

September 20, 2021