I followed this truck along Broadway and over the Broadway Bridge last week.

Which is to say, I followed the tow truck that was towing this beat-up old mail truck.

Every time I looked the delivery truck square in the face, it felt just a little off.  I knew it was being towed, but there is something eerie about looking at the front of a car that is facing you head on while also moving backward at the same speed you’re following.

It’s a little like turning the wrong way down a one-way street.  Even before you put your finger on it, that gut intuition part of your brain knows something is off.

Hypothetically speaking.  Because turning the wrong way down a one-way street would be foolish and ill-conceived.  Right?

There are plenty of experiences that are just a little off.  Say you’re in a hotel bed or someone’s guest room and you wake up in the middle of the night.  You have to coax your brain through the fog to remember where you are and why.  Something seems off.  Maybe the dream is still pulling you under and the foreign room is enough to hold you in limbo longer than normal.  So you push yourself up to sitting and turn your head side to side in a dark room to make sense of the unexpected distance between bed and wall, a doorway on the incorrect side of the room, the wrong light bleeding through a window.

Or how about this: Have you ever been talking with a friend when suddenly an entire sentence seems like it was in another language?  Missing a word or two at the beginning can throw everything off when we’re straining to make sense.

“Wait… Can you say that again?”

This not quite coherence, this off-ness, is a marvelous land. It is the place where we grapple with what we think we know and what eludes us. The mail truck is backing away from me across the bridge and slowing to rest at the red light.

Artists use this space all the time.

Some painters try to capture exactly what is there (and isn’t this a lie in itself, colors on flat canvas standing in for sturdy mountains and trees?). Others hack straight into this idea of perception and what it means to reduce a vibrant, three dimensional world to art.

Magritte anyone?

Or maybe what artists accomplish elevates the world to an art form.  Something is certainly more than a little off in many a Picasso portrait.  Ears where they shouldn’t ought to be and what have you.

U2’s front man Bono once sang, “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief.”

A line he lifted or amalgamated from somewhere else, no doubt, thereby making his own point.

We spend a lot of time trying to make sense of our world.  We expect it to add up most of the time.  Yet, as kids, much of what we see makes little sense to us.  Everything is questions and more questions:

“What daddy doin’?”

“Where Mr. Beachwood go?”

“Where fire truck go?”

“What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?”

This is the time in our life when we learn rapidly, get to know our world, figure stuff out in a hurry.

For the most part, kids take the foreign and the just a little off in stride better than we adults do.

Strange is merely something new to sort out.

Life is puzzles and mystery.  How you feel about this makes all the difference.

Earlier, I called this place of unsureness a marvelous land.  Marvelous doesn’t always mean comfortable, but it does mean opportunity.  Opportunity to tune up the part of our mind that figures stuff out.  As well as the part that quickly comes to terms with not understanding exactly what is going on.

In fact, it’s the latter skill that might be the most important for us. Existing in and with uncertainty.  About our planet, our future, our abilities.  Being uncertain and still moving forward instead of succumbing to paralysis.

Just a little off can be marvelous.

Stay sharp, stay humble, and remain confident that you will either figure it out or things will be okay when you don’t.