Just what is the fine line that separates sanity and insanity? Is it all a big judgment call? Is it socially defined? You can have an MRI picture taken of your head and can find a tumor. But you can’t necessarily take an MRI of the head and tell that someone is insane. It’s something to think about, especially in light of what I did Saturday morning.
My friend Sarah and I went on a hike in the woods up in the Big Thicket area of Southeast Texas with a group of nature lovers. To make a long story short it was raining rather steadily when we got to the trailhead and it pretty much rained the whole hour or so we were hiking. Now that in itself isn’t so bad. What was bad was the mud.
We mostly hiked around the edge of a creek with our objective a nice-sized little cliff over a pretty cool ravine with a view. But hiking around the creek subjected us to mud, lots and lots of mud. Coming back down from the hill I exited for quite a distance by way of ass — my ass. I had kind of viewed the hike up until that point as kind of a needless pain in the ass that maybe we should have avoided. But once I did the old slip-and-slide, I was convinced that this was a fun outing.
It was fun but kind of crazy for some folks. Like me. I’m not one given to extremes and I think most other times I would have said: “No thanks. I’m not going to go hiking in a downpour along a creek bottom.” It kind of got to where I wanted to make it up that hill and back just to say I did it. I mean it wasn’t all that huge a hill and in dry weather it would be a relatively easy hike.
The hike might have seemed normal to some people. And some may say about my contentions: “What a candy ass!” But like the razor-thin edge, which on one side lies sanity and the other side lunacy, so lives the figurative expressway that separates those who do from those who don’t. The truth is, one never knows on which side of the highway that they’ll find themselves. Not that it really matters. It’s only life.