Approach­ing the end of my annu­al sojourn of immers­ing myself more in Nature than the “real world”, I thought I’d learned quite a lot about both. An encounter with a loon, an advert, a gad­get and bed­room slip­pers put a kink in my confidence-cum-conceit.

The loon was one of those delight­ful, serendip­i­tous moments that are the reward for qui­et pad­dling and patience.
He/she was mov­ing equal­ly slow­ly across an open expanse of water. I drift­ed to with­in a cou­ple of pad­dle lengths when the bird sud­den­ly turned towards me and raised its wings.

I clicked off three quick frames, then dipped my pad­dle to back off a bit, con­fi­dent that I’d made it clear I wasn’t a threat.
In fact, I’d mis­read the action completely.
But more on that later.
My more seri­ous error was not real­is­ing that decades of pri­vate angst over and efforts to build and main­tain self-con­fi­dence have appar­ent­ly been a waste of time.
A bar­rage of adverts that erupts every time I open my pre­ferred online news web­sites informed me that all I real­ly need­ed was a tee shirt, slip­pers and a home x‑ray gadget.
The tee shirts are cheap­er if you order more than one, and appar­ent­ly one is sold “every five sec­onds”. But then, the ben­e­fits include: Hides “dad­bod” belly…Goodbye man­boobs.. Look more mus­cu­lar…all of which…Boosts con­fi­dence.
The oleo of man­gled tens­es are a sure sign it wasn’t writ­ten by any­one in the age group at which it’s aimed.
There’s no fine print health warn­ing, which even my cur­so­ry acquain­tance with mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties tells me the retail­ers are leav­ing them­selves wide open to appear­ing more sex­ist than a Don­ald Trump or J.D. Vance stump speech, to say noth­ing of charges of ageism.
The tee shirts  are tout­ed as “skims  for men”. I had to look up the term, and dis­cov­ered that  skims for women are gar­ments that push boobs up and make them more obvious.
Moobs (short for man­boobs in case you didn’t know) are proof (if it was need­ed) of how per­ni­cious Nature can be, espe­cial­ly when it comes to the effects of aging on moobs and boobs.
It’s like hair. Ours migrates to nose and ears. Women start grow­ing it on their chins.
Or so I’m told.
One of the ben­e­fits of get­ting old­er is that you learn enough to know that men­tion­ing the effects of aging in mixed com­pa­ny is the unspo­ken fourth in the list of things Peanuts char­ac­ter Linus not­ed that it’s a bad idea to dis­cuss, the oth­ers being reli­gion, pol­i­tics and the Great Pumpkin.
If that feels like too much to deal with, you def­i­nite­ly do not need the “unbe­liev­ably bizarre gift nobody to would think of”. That’s because by using it, “….your entire body gets scanned and ana­lyzed with 4 pre­ci­sion sen­sors that see 14 impor­tant health met­rics…”  includ­ing “body fat percentage”.

                  ALL YOU NEED IS

Bil­ly Joel once sang that for the new fash­ion: “All you need are looks and a whole lot­ta mon­ey…”.     Now you don’t even need the looks, just lash out 900 dol­lars for a pair of slip­pers  — as in the bed­room vari­ety — and then wear them in the street.
But guess what: “In addi­tion to being com­fort­able, slip­pers project con­fi­dence when worn out­doors, some fans find — a sense of proud­ly defy­ing convention.”
No men­tion is made of the pos­si­bil­i­ty that pay­ing that much for a pair of slip­pers also projects a total lack of com­mon sense.
And that’s anoth­er con­cept that seems to be con­fused with a lack of confidence.
Com­mon sense comes with age, not mon­ey. I’d rather pay 900 dol­lars for sev­er­al pairs of glass­es (the more you have the eas­i­er it is to find a pair when you need them) than on a pair of slip­pers, even if they are made in “silk jacquard”.
Com­mon sense (and a hard-earned aware­ness of how much eas­i­er it is to fall as you age), means I don’t go up or down stairs with­out my hand on or near a railing.
I ride my moun­tain bike a lot slow­er over rough ground than I used to, and avoid spots on trails that I used to treat as a chal­lenge. That’s not a lack of con­fi­dence, it’s an aware­ness that the poten­tial dam­age and recov­ery time from even a minor fall will be sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than it was a few years ago .I don’t like it, but age and injuries have afford­ed me enough mea­sure of wis­dom to accept reality.
Anoth­er way of seek­ing con­fi­dence is the mod­ern form of the Amer­i­can  the­olo­gian and ethi­cist, Rein­hold Niebuhr’s “Prayer for Seren­i­ty”: “God, grant me the seren­i­ty to accept the things I can­not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wis­dom to know the dif­fer­ence.”But then, he didn’t  have the ben­e­fit of tee shirts or sil­ly-price slippers.
Which brings me back to the loon.

The bird wasn’t star­tled or fright­ened. Quite the contrary.
It was prepar­ing to lift up and preen, a form of feath­er main­te­nance.
That’s the kind of con­fi­dence mon­ey can’t buy.

And as an uncon­fi­dent p.s.  – the focus is less than sharp  because the loon’s wings were flap­ping faster than I could adjust the camera’s shut­ter speed.

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