Corn

On Friday I was sitting at the computer listening to a humming popcorn popper in the kitchen. None of the kernels had popped yet. It’s the same popper we’ve used many a time for precisely what we (I and some friends) were about to do: watch a movie. Videos and popcorn go well together, I think. I often find that one without the other is always missing that… that… Kodak-catching-you-off-guard-stuffing-your-face moment.

Did you know that to make popcorn it requires a specific kind of corn? I mean not any kind of corn would do. You can’t just pluck any old wild corn cob from a field and stick it in the microwave. No, no, it must be of the flint strain. Even so, I considered plucking the cobs of corn from the stalks as we ran amuck through the field last Friday. And no, we weren’t trespassing or stomping down corn stalks to make absolutely amazing geometric shapes that you could only recognize from high in the air. We were racing through a corn maze as an activity to welcome students back from the summer break.

We had it figured out by the time we got there, that the best way to guarantee our finishing was to only take lefts, and when we hit a dead-end, turn and take our next left, and by so doing, we would theoretically end up at the goal, which was the tower. There were a few set backs, including which was a darkening sky, rain that made it cold, and slippery muck underfoot which was a result of the rain.

At first I wasn’t looking forward to the self-imposed torture of shivering to death in some distant, dark, dead-end path of the corn maze. After all, didn’t they teach us in elementary school that if you’re lost, to stay put? What crummy instructions in dark, cold corn maze. Let someone find you. Bah!

In short, I wasn’t looking forward to it at all, and was seriously considering waiting in the car for my comrades to finish, but after the other three took off into the first set of winding pathways through the corn, (key in pocket), what was I supposed to do, wait alone to shiver and die on a wet hay bale or car hood while the rain drowned any hope of warmth? Of course not! So I took off after them.

After only a short distance of jogging, I found that I started to warm up. The good side was that it was warmer, and the down side was that every step was precarious because of the slippery mud. As soon as I felt confident I wouldn’t freeze to death I decided that I would really get into the ‘left turn only hypothesis’, and immerse myself in the whole ‘getting lost’ aspect of this activity.

(Tip: Try using runners with grip if it’s going to be wet in any degree while going through a corn maze. It gets really muddy. And don’t use your good shoes. I learned that last bit the hard way. My shoes are still outside drying two days later after washing the muck off them.)

There was something interesting about the psychology of other people. It seemed that some people continued thinking that they never really wanted to be there in the first place, and so they went back and tried to help others out of the maze. Or at least that is my take on why others tried to be so helpful. But a big part of my brain kept saying “Doesn’t that… like… completely destroy the whole idea of going in the maze, if someone helps you to get out? I mean… If we went in, shouldn’t we expect to find our own way out?”

Oh well.

Eventually, after a long time of running/jogging/skiing through the muck and turning corners and bumping into people and wishing I hadn’t brought my good pants and shoes, we came to a T in the path where a sign stood that said “EXIT”. It was a very satirical sign staring at me while the rain poured down, because though it pointed left, not right, the tower (the goal of the maze) was to our right. We had followed all the left turns, and here we were, at the end, with the next left leading out of the maze, and no more left turns to lead to the tower. By theory, we didn’t make it.

There is a moral to the story that I’d like to mention. The moral is that we still have to keep our eyes open. Experiments, logic, reason, all of those useful tools are only so good before they fail us if we fail to think, feel and look around. There is something to be said for good old-fashioned gut feelings that more and more often in this society we overlook because we think we know how it works.

Dr. Alan Wallace said “The major impediment to discovery is not ignorance but the illusions of knowledge.” How true that knowledge can get in the way of itself. We think we know best, which gets in the way of actually knowing best. In the same way that thinking that turning left will for sure get us to the tower, I submit that we (including myself) may be wrong in other areas, for instance that corn could perhaps be popped even if it’s not of the flint strain, and that just because people were helping us out of the maze doesn’t mean they necessarily didn’t want to be there. Maybe they just enjoyed helping people. As it turned out, I had the urge once I finished to turn around and help the rest of them find their way. Odd how that works.

I suppose the other thing I learned from this is that some people, as was my case, do not want to be helped, but rather want to stick through things, finding out the hard way that shoes with good grip would work better in the muck than street shoes, and that not just any old wild popcorn can be popped, and that turning left doesn’t always get you home.

Now please excuse me, I have to go turn my shoes over so they can continue drying out.