I think I may be a terminal moderate. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad.

I’m in the middle of:

• Eat only organic, antioxidant, cleanse …. Fast food’s fine
• Ace the hardest question …. Do only what you have to
• Use it till it dies …. Aw, toss it
• Olympic downhill …. Couch it, fireside in the lodge
• GPS, latest tech …. Still breathing, okay — Go!
• Proclaim …. Deny

I’m more of a:

— Read the label, now the next one, fix it if you can, try the Nastar course, monitor your own pulse, seek what’s true — kind of gal. Jumping in at either end makes halfway seem a long ways off.

It’s fun to be a monkey in the middle. Did you ever play that game? Where the job of the two players on the outside was to keep the “monkey” in the middle from getting the ball. They’d toss it high overhead or run past and hand it off. The harder the monkey works to get the ball, the harder the players – let’s call them zookeepers – had to work to avoid him. If the ball was intercepted the zookeeper at fault was in the middle and the game began again.

Photo credit to:
https://blog.gungroo.com/5-outdoor-games-for-kids/

Fun. Unless the monkey just stood in the middle. No sport to that. Yes, the fun is in the effort and the winning and then the exchange of positions. In fact, when I started my practices with this game I would have a mutiny on my hands if I stopped the play before everyone had the chance to be a monkey.

Today, we even get bogged down in aggravated debate about whether we’re descended from monkeys. For the record, I would much rather be a monkey than a zookeeper. Never was very good at making sure the doors are locked and the light is off. I’m more a middling kind of gal. Like to hang in the center and invite my friends. It’s more fun when you have 2 or 3 in there with you. Then you have a barrel full of monkeys (a fun game, too) and you can extend your reach. Not so surprising if you suppose that Jesus actually said,

 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” (Matt 18:20)

Seems right. I find I act very differently when I am in the large outside ring instead of a small inner circle. I’m kinder and gentler in there. I guess I try harder there. Because it’s important to me to get along with the ones I am close to and because we have a job to do: we gotta get that ball!

It’s about the common objective and the game plan. Wouldn’t it be cool of we could link up end to end and transmit the same, perfectly reproducible, identical in intensity, unaltered in frequency, never diminished message from the first monkey to the last? Now THAT would be a cool strategy. Hard, yes. Impossible, nearly, but no. Our nerve cells do it everyday as a matter of design; it’s called an action potential.

Ah, but all I hear is “who needs a middle man.” Hey, somebody’s got to chase the ball. And why would monkeys want a ball anyway? Maybe because they would be tempted not to share a banana. No action potential there.