Read Your Notes!

My wife and I love to watch The Amazing Race. In this show, a ten-time Emmy winner for Best Competition Series, teams travel around the globe and perform challenges that might involve learning a location’s traditional dance, participating in a local business like food delivery or denture fitting (!), or matching portraits of historic figures with living models appropriately dressed and coifed. It’s an inspiring travelogue with the added bonus of human interest and competition.

But occasionally during an episode, the viewer’s almost continuous sense of awe is interrupted by frustration as a team heads out on a challenge without picking up the required equipment or hails a tuk-tuk when the clue explicitly says to proceed on foot to the next destination. The most frequently uttered phrase on the lips of the Amazing Race afficionado: READ YOUR CLUE!

I recently finished Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion for the third time in my life. I remembered (incorrectly, it turns out) not understanding it before and amazed myself at how much I was able to absorb in this book by the most abstruse of my favorite authors. But today I read what I wrote eleven years ago after my previous encounter with the book. I appeared to understand even more then and recorded some very smart, very helpful observations. Why didn’t I review what I had written before rereading the book? Chapter 15 would have made so much more sense!

Hmmm. Am I going to share any of those smart, helpful ideas with you, reader? No. Today’s post is only about admitting my intellectual frailty and publicly scolding myself to READ YOUR NOTES!