Listen

There must have been a time in my life when I was bored. I don't remember it, but surely it happened. After all, it seems so common in the lives of others. I hear people talk about being bored by movies, by books, when they're at work, when they aren't at work. Thousand and thousands of people occupy themselves seeking to prevent us from being bored, or offering us alternatives when we are. We can watch television shows, go to movies, view or participate in sports, take classes, or, of course, shop.

But boredom has never been my problem. Quite the opposite. In childhood, I always had the random teasing and attacks of older brothers to anticipate, or the continual fighting between my parents to wrench me from whatever peace I managed to find. Even more than that, though, I wasn't bored because the world just fascinated me, and it still does.

I'm endlessly curious about why people do the things they do, how they come to their beliefs and attitudes. I wonder at the beauty, the horror, the panorama of life. If nothing else, I wonder about my future, and the future of those I care about. I see the textured surface of a wall and wonder how it was made, and why it's considered fashionable. I hear a song and think about how it reminds me of something else I heard twenty years ago, or last week. I think, I dream, I worry, but always something occupies my mind. This isn't always a good thing.

A former professor of mine once talked about how her mind seems to work in something of the same way. She described it as having a kind of second head on her right shoulder, constantly commenting on life, constantly chattering away, belittling, remarking, describing, warning, pestering. I don't know if other people experience life in that way, but I certainly do.

When my life is going well, I'm able to turn that other voice and its constant chatter into insights, questions, ideas. But sometimes we take a wrong turn, and it fuels an endless anxiety. I remember when the film "A Beautiful Mind" came out and was praised for its depiction of mental illness, but except for the fact that I don't mistake my voices for real people, his existence felt somewhat familiar to me.

Lately, I've been going through a time of unease whose source I can't quite identify. I find myself struggling to sleep at night, sometimes uncharacteristically quiet with my wife. I give this concern tangible labels, like "money" or "where I am spiritually" or "work," concrete names that are supposed to help me locate and solve the problem. But I suspect something else is at work. That other head is trying to tell me something, trying to shake me out of some lethargy. It wants something more from me than to settle into the routines of life; it isn't content with my going through the motions.

Because when it comes down to it, I'd really rather be bored. I'd rather be able, sometimes at least, do disengage from the wonder that each moment brings to me. I'd rather be able to spend an ordinary day going through my ordinary tasks without generating a million new questions. I'd rather have some peace.

Instead, I live with the roar of that other voice, like the ocean, pounding beside my head. I tilt my head. I'm trying to listen.

Painful Too

In December of 1980, the fall of my sophomore year in college, John Lennon was shot to death on the sidewalk in front of the Dakota in New York City. Most people my age had just caught the tail end of the Beatles craze, but some of my friends were intense fans nonetheless and we were stunned, shattered by his murder. After his death, my friend Kent and I went to a candlelight vigil at the Student Union where people stood silently for a while, then sang songs of his. We left after about half an hour; the truth is, we had no idea what to do with what we were feeling.

It's one thing to say, as I did in my earlier post, that pain has to be embraced and suffering is a part of life. "Life is tough" is an easy phrase to throw around. But when that wave of pain rises up like a wall and slams into my door, it's a different matter.

I remember the disorientation I floated in for months after my father died. Or several years earlier the way I moved in a daze for a good half a year when my first wife and I lost a pregnancy. The grief feels a bit ridiculous after a while, embarrassing even. People, of course, were very sympathetic on both occasions, but after a few weeks or months, I couldn't see talking about it over and over again. I wanted to; it was the main thing that occupied my thoughts. But I couldn't imagine that people wanted to hear about it four months after the event.

After Lennon was killed, Paul Simon, being Paul Simon, wrote "The Late, Great Johnny Ace," which is on his "Hearts and Bones" album (they were just albums, not CDs, in those days--the early 1980s). Like most of the album, the song is bittersweet, sad and evocative. The album didn't do very well, in part because I think many people found it a "downer," too depressing. But the album that came next from Simon was "Graceland," and I doubt if he could have made it without the album that came before it.

In "The Uses of the Blues," probably my favorite essay by anyone, ever, James Baldwin writes about the necessity of suffering. But more importantly, he writes about how to make suffering "legitimate" in the way I like to think Carl Jung meant when he said that "all neurosis is the substitute for legitimate suffering." Suffering legitimately means not only enduring it, thought I need to do that, and accepting it, though I need to do that too. It also means transforming it. Or maybe I should say, allowing myself to be transformed by it.

Simon turned his grief over Lennon's death into a song, into art. Others turn suffering into a deeper sense of purpose, the way Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address (probably one of my favorite speeches by anyone, ever). But transforming pain is an art. Going from pain to anger or rage, for example, isn't transforming it; it's deflecting it; it's lashing out or revenge.

I want to turn my pain to creation. I want to make something living from what I've lost, not simply kill something else. "Hearts and Bones" is a song about two people traveling in New Mexico, their relationship unraveling; in "Graceland," two people--a parent and child--are also traveling, but this time on a journey of hope. It's a journey that has it's difficulties, but the speaker in the song "has reason to believe we both will be received into Graceland."

I believe too, that if I can work through my pain to the creation of something honest, grace may await my efforts. Anyway, that's my journey of hope. That's the pilgrimage I'm on.

Painless One

These past few days have seen me return to some of my old tricks. When given time to myself, I turn on the television, or I turn on the computer and read through endless inane stories, or I start to flip through the celebrity magazines. Anything that shuts off my mind. I have been doing well during the past week and a half about my jogging, though I have to fight the temptation to run through the mathematics and realize that my current 12-minute per mile pace means I'm more than twice as slow as I was twenty years ago. Marathoners when they're hitting the wall run faster than I do right now.

And that's the difficulty. I know that my slow plodding does me good; I don't mind the creakiness I feel when I first get going, and even the soreness feels good. But it seems that where ever I turn, I come face to face with the years I've lost diddling my time and my life away when I could have been working, writing, dreaming, acting in the world. Sometimes, I'd rather to anything than think about that.

I've enjoyed, on the whole, getting older, but the pain of wasted time sometimes rushes at me so suddenly that I have to throw something--anything--in its path: a reality TV show, a box of Carr's Wheatmeal Biscuits, a film on Turner Classic Movies, a spin on the internet, endless games of Minesweeper. You see the irony here; to stave off the pain of the time I've lost, I waste more. I cover over sadness with what will surely lead to more sadness. It's called, I think, addiction.

I have known some people who specialize in one or two addictions. And some people, of course, are much more intense and more destructive than others. I don't mean to trivialize those who become so enmeshed in drug or alcohol use, or sex or gambling or work or shopping, that they send their lives spinning into an abyss; I have seen that in far too intimate a way not to recognize the difference in degree that is from my diversions. But in one way or another, so many of us seem to me in flight from the reality that to live is to experience loss and suffering.

That all life is suffering is the first of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths. And Carl Jung said that "All neurosis is the substitute for legitimate suffering." We don't need to go in search of it; we don't need to inflict it on ourselves. The sheer act of living gives us opportunities enough. Maybe the angst of adolescence is nothing more than facing the emotionally wrenching truth that the fantasies of childhood have ended. And even for someone like me, who had an unhappy childhood and prayed for it to end, losing the vision and perspective of childhood hurts.

My culture tells me that whenever I feel suffering, something has gone wrong. I must have made a bad decision in my relationships or my professional life; I don't have enough money; I'm not living the right lifestyle; I'm not eating the right foods or buying the right products; I'm voting for the wrong politicians or worshipping in the wrong religion. If I would only correct my life, the commercials and billboards and self-help-personal-power gurus tell me, I won't ever have to suffer again.

But I'm convinced that life equals change, and change means loss as well as gain. Life, in short, hurts. But the capacity to undergo suffering also contains the capacity to feel joy. I think that's what Jung was talking about. I can't kill one capacity without killing the other, without deadening myself to reality and life. The same callus that interposes itself between me and pain also makes it impossible for me to feel the touch of those I love.

Flock

This is one of those circling, waiting times. I sit mentally on a park bench, on a breezeless evening, but warm. Summer twilight. The sun has dropped behind the mountains to the west, and deep blue gathers in the sky. Bird and bat swooping time, when the air grows thick with insects and flocks turn and feed together in the air.

I see this motion all around me as I sit, and I want to catch it all. My eye flows this way and then another, bits of black action fluttering out of the corner of my eye but gone by the time I turn to look. Soon streetlights come on, pools of illumination. Birds dart across them.

I can't help thinking of the Yeats poem "The Second Coming," where chaos is descending upon the world. The imagery of the falcon flying its widening circling, moving further and further away from the falconer, no longer attendant to its master's voice. When I got up this morning, my thoughts, too, seemed scattered and lost in the gathering gloom; I could only catch glimpses of them.

At first I felt anxious. I didn't know what to write or whether I could. I walked around the house, opened my journal and browsed through the pages. But gradually, it occurred to me that the loss of control didn't mean the loss of something to say. I retired my mind to the park bench and waited. Slowly, in the silence, the words began to accummulate, individuals, in small clatches. They gathered as they do when I don't startle them. They clumped and grouped and formed themselves.

I don't believe that things can fall apart. If it seems that the center cannot hold, maybe we were looking to the wrong center.

The essence of things, the heart of them, exists beyond my ability to turn or call or shape them. I can live in that essence or not, look at the world through its eyes or not. But it waits below the surface of my knowing. It gathers in the shadows of our busy-ness. I wait, let my eyes slowly adjust to the light, and I can see them in the dark.

Anticipation

I sit down to write, and I end up staring at the screen or the sheet of blank paper or the keys of the typewriter (yes, I still have one, a big, metal IBM Selectrix II, green, and it weighs a ton). I used to tell myself I didn't want to write because I knew I'd write crap. I could see the idea revealing itself word by word on that little screen on the inside of my head, the inside of my forehead just above my eyebrows, and I didn't like what I saw: poorly chosen words, ideas that meandered across the imaginary page, sentences begun and abandoned like old towns bypassed by the highway. I could see the disaster I was about to commit, and I thought, "What's the point?" That's what I told myself.

Yesterday, during my lunch hour, I went to Target and bought canned soup to put in my large desk drawer so I have something to eat on the days I forget to bring lunch from home. And I bought wavy potato chips, and I bought those generic Target vanilla wafers. I knew the chips and cookies weren't the kinds of things I should be buying if I'm trying to get in shape. I knew they didn't fit with the picture of myself I'm trying to create, with a man trying to move toward health and treating his body well. But a part of me was saying--a part of me I couldn't hear until I replayed the choices in my mind later--that what I ate wasn't going to matter, that I wasn't ever going to be that healthy, in shape guy. You know how this turns out, it told me. You'll try this for a while, then you'll give up.

It's easier when you know. It takes so much less energy to settle into the inevitable, into the certain. I put on the weight of anticipated and expectation like a heavy coat, and I feel my shoulders bending to it's shape, feel my back curve down, my legs bow, my head lower. Something about it feels good. It's killing me, but it feels good.

Often enough in my life, I've been sucker-punched by the fury of surprise. As a child, I could never tell how the day would go or where the next conflict would come from. Would my father's drinking or my mother's anger envelope us that day? Would furniture end up overturned? Would the belt fall on one of us kids? Or would it turn out, after all, to be an ordinary day of school and play and reading and television?

The hardest part wasn't dealing with the fights and violence; the hardest part was not knowing when they were going to come. So it became much easier to expect that every day would eventually go wrong. That way, I didn't have to wonder; I didn't have to adjust when things suddenly turned. I could always be ready.

But I've discovered, of course, that everything you really love surprises you. I didn't expect to meet the woman who would become my new wife at a friend's housewarming party a year and a quarter ago. I never expected my sons to become the people they have so far, to develop the interests they exhibit. And the words that emerge when I do manage to put them down, all the words I've put together on this screen, don't look at all like the ones that unscrolled themselves in my head like a cautionary tale before I began.

Surprise seems more and more to be the point of life, not necessarily thrills or big events or suspense, but the unanticipated discoveries that each moment makes available to us. It terrifies me because the surprises don't always feel good; they can hurt like hell: loss pregnancies, broken relationships, death, pain, rejection.

When I taught writing classes, I struggled to get my students not to come to closure too quickly on their ideas or their words. I urged them to suspend closure and come back again and again to their essays from a new angle and let themselves be surprised. All my life, I've had that same struggle with myself, trying to convince myself to see each day new, to "dwell in possibility," as my old friend Emily would day.

Most of us find it more comforting to dwell in certainty, or in what we choose to treat as certain since, no matter what we think, we never know what life will bring us. But I need to remind myself that the only certainty is death, and that the ultimate act of certainty is suicide, a refusal to continue at all. To paraphrase the line that ends the old story, "Dying is easy; not knowing what's going to happen next is hard."

But I do want to go on. I want to see what's going to happen next. I'm fighting for the part of me that chooses that response to life. And that's always been the question, hasn't it? Surprise or certainty? Love or fear?

Traffic

The wind has blown hard the past two days. Tall palm trees bend, lean, and waver in response to the force of moving air. Dead browning palm fronds end up in the road or on sidewalks. Even green leaves lose their grip. You can't see it--the air--but you can see what it does to the world around you.

I sit here now in my study, the light from my lamp concentrated in a small but intense circle that falls on my keyboard, on my fingers moving over the keys, the sound of the clicking pleasantly telling me I'm doing something, that something is taking place, even if I don't know what it is, even if I don't know if it's significant. I still know something is happening.

I feel that way most of the time. That some wind is blowing through my life, blowing through me. I can't see it; I can't really name it or identify what it's doing to me or with me. I only know--or believe--that it exists.

Of course, maybe that's just what I tell myself in order to be able to get up in the morning and not feel like a complete idiot. Maybe I say that to myself so I don't decide once and for all to chuck the obligations and relationships and the other thousand details of life that get in the way of just saying to hell with it and quitting work and selling the car and buying a ticket to nowhere and moving there permanently.

Too much this weekend I argued with my teenaged son. My heart. My heart. I keep thinking about my heart. What does that mean? I have a muscle in the middle to left side of my chest. It beats; if I sit still for long enough, I can feel and hear it beating in my chest. It has a regularity to it. It has it's own pace. But most of the time, I don't hear it. Most of the time, I'm talking too loudly, or I'm watching television or a movie, or I'm reading something that makes me irate, or I'm hunting, hunting for something to occupy my attention and my mental energy.

I rush from moment to moment. In my car, on the way to work, I become irate if the driver in my line travels below the speed limit. I sometimes becomes irate if the driver is at or above the speed limit but could be going faster because traffic is light. I curse to myself, throw my hands up in disgust, stomp on the accelerator and speed around as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
I have no idea why I do that. Generally, I am in no particular hurry to get to work. My job is fine, but it doesn't set my life or world on fire. But this urgency I feel in traffic has nothing to do with there I'm going. When I get irate, work doesn't occupy my mind. I simply feel an urgency, a desire to travel as fast as I possibly can.

I see the wind pushing everything before it. I feel myself pushed, tumbled headlong through the day. I blow through time, through hours and days and weeks in anticipation or something, or so it would seem from the pace I feel obligated to set, from the rushing I do. But most of the time, I have no idea where I'm going.

How do I deal with this speed? How do I come to terms with this shoving, this insistence? I feel a hunger for a silence that I don't allow myself to have.

Buying a Tribe

I find myself thinking a lot about belonging these days, about the ways I affiliate myself with the human beings around (or even those distant from) me. Maybe it's because, as a military brat, I grew up in so many different places. I was born in another country, in Germany, and a South African friend of mine suggested that I might be able to obtain a German passport because of that. She thought it would be cool, not to mention someday convenient, to have passports from more than one country (this is, of course, the sort of thing that would never occur to most Americans; until she suggested it it had never occurred to me). The more I thought about it, the cooler it seemed to me too. But when I went to the website for German consulates in the U.s., I discovered that I never belonged to Germany either because both my parents were U.S. citizens.

A long time ago, we used to talk about our belonging in terms of tribes, and I still find that a useful way to think about it. A tribe shares your interests and history, biological or otherwise. If gives you a sense that you aren't alone in the world; it can provide values and structure and even family.

Like many people, our culture's mobility has undermined my ability to find a tribe according to geography. I lived in Kansas the longest, from adolscence through early adulthood, but I haven't lived there now for more than 20 years. I've lived in too many places, both as a child and an adult to claim a tribe that way.

At one time, people could belong according to the place where they worked: a steel mill or an auto factory or a farm or newspaper or corporation. But we've become pretty mobile about our work too. I've been a reporter, a teacher, an editor, and a smattering of other things since I was first in college. Each in turn held out the promise of a solid tribal affiliation, but I don't think any of them has ended up really defining me.

And so, like many Americans, I've tried to find my tribal affiliation by buying it. Our culture often tells us that we are what we own: PC or Mac, Levi's or Wranglers, Ralph Lauren or Tommy. Is the house brick or adobe or wood frame or manufactured? Is the television Sanyo or Sony? Does my bed have independent coils or a sleep number?

In high school, I was in the tribe of Adidas wearers, then I spent time in the Nike tribe. Nowadays, I've joined the tribe that purchases discounted running shoes.

Cars are one of the quickest paths to tribal affiliation. Currently, I belong to the Honda tribe, specifically those who own the late-1980s Civic four wheel drive wagons. Mine is light blue, and when I spot another member of the tribe, also in pale blue or a kind of golden bronze or more rarely white, I feel an instant kinship no matter what the age or gender or race of my tribe mate. I'm pretty happy with my tribe, but I have to admit I sometimes dream of joining the tribe of Subaru or Volvo. Of course, ultimately, I really want to be in the tribe of Prius, but let's not get crazy here.

My more immediate short term is to join the tribe washer-dryer owners, and then, in a few years, the tribe of homeowners, possibly van owners. I don't know that I could count on any of my fellow tribe members if the chips were down, but I don't know that that's the point anymore. Really belonging gets very messy and complicated. It involves dealing with people I sometimes disagree with, and remaining connected to and invested in them anyway. It means admitting I'm wrong sometimes, having to do things someone else's way, realizing that I'm not in control of the universe and shouldn't be.

So I drift back and forth between wanting the autonomy of independence and the belonging of tribal life. When I think about it that way, it sounds quite a bit like dealing with my sons when they were in toddlerhood. I don't know where that leaves me, but it's not a hopeful sign.

Elsewhere

Sometimes, I find myself trying to figure out how to save the world. I don't do it as much as I used to, but occasionally my mind begins to contemplate the plight of the politically oppressed in Myanmar, sex workers in the Philippines, struggling indigenous people in the Amazon rain forest, the dispossessed in Darfur. What these groups of people share--besides very real problems in need of very real and complex solutions--is distance from me. And I've learned over the years that when it comes to saving others, distance makes the heart grow more compassionate.

At various difficult times in my life, I've fantasized about leaving it all and traveling to some far and troubled place. It would be someplace perpetually warm and humid, and of course the people there would speak another language--preferably difficult and obscure; I'd learn it in no time and gain their trust. I'd throw myself into caring for the people, and the lack of modern cultural distractions would allow me to work on my writing, which I would publish, which would bring me acclaim, and which would allow me to return home in triumph. I never really thought about what would happen to the people I had been caring for at that point; more importantly, my own rehabilitation and redemption would be complete.

Why that fantasy has appealed to me all these years, I can't say for certain. But I know that part of it involves the appeal of distance. I can look at the problems of people in that faraway place because I can feel very certain that the problems aren't really mine. I don't belong to that society, so I didn't create them. They have arisen from that place's history or political leadership or something else beyond my control. And because I have no stake in the problem, my willingness to deal with it makes me all the more self-sacrificing.

Facing suffering close to home, though, differs quite a bit from dealing with suffering elsewhere. Images of large eyes and gaunt faces pull at my heart when they're on the television. But the flesh and blood gaunt faces at the stoplight on the way to work, the thin hands holding up hand-scrawled signs on dirty cardboard, those I don't want to see. They can make eye contact with me. They are only a car window's thickness away, too close for comfort.

Unlike the sufferers elsewhere, I know these local people. I've seen them before. I live--and flourish--in the same communal space where they struggle. These are my neighbors; these are my poor. The kids on the southside of town going to overcrowded schools are my children; the teens getting into trouble are mine; the old who can't get from one side of the city to the other because of poor mass transit are my elders. They make me think about the precariousness of my life here, how easily I might lose the things and people I have. They make me wonder about the rules and circumstances of this place where I live.

Of course, I feel uncomfortable asking those questions. And to keep that discomfort at bay, I prefer to think of this place where I live as basically just, of success as basically available to anyone here. This lets me believe that whatever I have, I deserve; I've earned it. In other words, seeing Here as the just and fortunate place and There as the sad, oppressed place obscures the reality and people of both places. It becomes easier for me to ignore what I might be doing to make this place where I live better.

I don't mean at all that I shouldn't care about what happens on the other side of the world. I should do what I can to support the people and organizations that try to make a difference there, and I should educate myself so that I know one Elsewhere from another, so that I distinguish between Kenya and the Congo, between Honduras and El Salvador, between Malaysia and Myanmar.

But saving Elsewhere doesn't absolve me from facing the pain around me, in my city, in my neighborhood. The pain that I own, or should own. If I want to save people, there are plenty just outside my own front door.

The Pain of Running Again

The creak in the knees, that's the first thing I notice. Like a sacrament, like the outward sign or an inward state.

At my age now, after a long layoff I first feel soreness in my joints, not while I'm running but after and for a few days. They complain at any sudden movement, any odd angle, and especially when I rise from sitting or lying down to standing. I remember when I could shift from sitting cross-legged on the floor to standing without using my hand to grab or lean on or pull myself up, when I could rise like that in one movement.

I run behind the elementary school across the street from my house. A 600-yard track stretches in one long loop around a field and playground and basketball court and a small ramada. In a few places, acacia and mesquite trees hang their thorns over the red clay of the track. I run through sand, in spots, and over gopher holes and clumps of weeds and grass.

Three laps to the mile, roughly, and I try to manage six laps. Now the desert days have cooled, and I start a little before sunset, see deepening blue whenever I'm facing the east and yellow afterglow when I turn to the west. It takes me at least ten minutes to get warm.

During the run, I usually don't feel any pain. My muscles groan a bit at first, but then they work; they remember, and they pull, stretch, extend, and shrink. I sweat pretty easily, and I let the breathing come and go as it will. I let my lungs take care of themselves, filling and emptying.

My wife doesn't like running much, which is okay because, though she's done it on and off, it's never really been her sport. She's a swimmer, and I love watching her move through the water almost as though she didn't need to come up for air; as thought the surface of it were holding her while she slices through. And that's how I feel when I'm running.

But afterwards, the pain starts. I run my laps, walk a bit, then slowly jog across the street back to my house. The pain creeps up then, at the knees and hips and ankles, radiating up and down through me. If I stretch, it quiets down to a dull, almost pleasant ache. It returns the next morning, when I move to get out of bed, and I carry it through the day.

Mostly it's memory that hurts; it's time. Time lost and let go. I think of the miles I haven't covered, on and off over the years. I think of where my body might be--where I might be--had I kept in motion. The months and years I watched slip by, sitting still, echo through me and it hurts, it hurts. A part of my head tells me that what's gone is gone, but I know this heaviness.

The heaviness looks like weight, on my thighs and my butt, on my arms, the fleshiness that pads my face and neck and shoulders. But I recognize it for the grief it is. Grief over what I have wasted, over everything I have wasted. And grief will have its own tempo and time. It will have its pain when I finish running the evening's 600-yard loops. Salt sweat, like tears, pours from my skin.

Old to New

How do you change? How do you walk those steps between the person you were and the person you think you want to become?

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, or so the Chinese say. But there's a proverb born every minute. Does that really explain to me how to get from the television to the gym? Does it put my feet on the road to go running? Does it close the refrigerator door when I find myself standing in front of it and I know I'm not hungry, at least not for food, especially not for that leftover quarter of strawberry rhubarb pie I'm hovering over even though I ate dinner only about a half an hour ago and what I really need to do is get ready for bed.

There should exist some tricks here. Maybe if I get that set of Tony Robbins tapes. But then I'd have to see his face and body on the boxed set or the covers of the innumerable books he's churned out, and to me something about him seems too big. Too much face and jaw. Too much body. Too much traveling in helicopters and demonstrating how to break boards with his bare hands, wearing too many impeccable suits. God love him, he's made a success. But I don't want to be anything resembling Tony Robbins.

Of course, there are other plans out there. You can't swing a dead remote control without seeing someone's new plan for the new you that will give you a new life, job, home, relationship, or head of hair. My head of hair is fine, though what's inside the cranium I sometime have doubts about.

But when does change happen? Do you become new at the moment you decide to behave differently? Or is it when you actually do behave differently, even if you don't feel it in your heart yet? Or does it take place when something inside you clicks? Do you wake up one day, after weeks or months or years of following through on those new habits, of eating or exercising or talking or walking or praying differently, and recognize the distance you've traveled from what you once were and know then, "Ah, now I've changed"?

For several years, I attended Al Anon, the 12-step group for friends and family of alcoholics, and Adult Children of Alcoholics, another group. Hours spent in little rooms with folding chairs and folding tables and carpeting selected sometime in the 1950s or 1970s (those stand out in my mind as big decades for carpets). I saw people come to meetings week after week and month after month, telling the same story. Struggling with the same behavior and feelings. Making the same mistakes. It comforted me, because I was doing the same thing.

I know that for me (and I suspect for many of the others), that hour and a half in the meeting was the sanest part of my week. The fact that I was doing the same stupid things felt different when I talked about them to people whose basic response was simply, "Yeah, I've been there. Sometimes I'm still there. Just keep coming back." It's as though we were being the same but we were practicing being different, an hour and a half at a time. Rehearsing it out loud, trying to build up in my head--from the collective voices of the other people in the meetings--this new entity inside me. A voice to tell me, when I was on the verge of making the same mistake, "You know that's not a good idea. You don't need to do that. Let's do something else instead."

Maybe that's all a new habit is, a voice that tells you "This is what we do now, at this moment. Remember, this is what we do." I'm listening. I'm listening hard for that voice.

Not Going Anywhere

Sunday night, and another work week threatens. I know I'm not supposed to have that attitude. I'm supposed to believe that "it's all good." In fact, when co-workers greet me at the beginning of every Friday with "Happy Friday," I'm the kind of self-righteous person who gets silently annoyed (although I'm much too self-actualized, I tell myself, to display my annoyance). In the grand scheme of things, Friday is just another day on the calendar, no better or worse than any other. And if we're living our lives right, we appreciate each day for what it is: a gift from the universe and the creator, another chance to start over, to try to get it right while knowing and accepting that I'll always fall short. I'm supposed to greet each day as an opportunity to become a better person.

And part of me is doing that, breathing my way through the end of this day as I celebrate each minute of life and revel in the sensation of living itself.

Then there's the other part of me. It's the part that keeps looking at the clock down in the lower right hand corner of my computer screen, the part that watches each minute tick by, moving me one minute closer to bedtime, which moves me closer to waking up tomorrow morning, which moves me closer to the slow slog through a shower, something like a breakfast, and the 25-minute drive through morning traffic to work. I can picture myself passing through the doors, arriving at my desk, and trying to rouse the energy to make it through another day of tasks that, despite my best effort, hold absolutely no intrinsic value for me whatsoever.

This is not how a person seeking to renew his sense of himself is supposed to think. I'm not supposed to say to myself that if a 40-something has to do work that doesn't excite him, at least he should be making good money at it. A pilgrim's supposed to celebrate each step as one more act moving him toward his goal. Instead, I can't help but wonder sometimes if something went wrong in my 20-year plan.

I'm a sucker for transformation stories, for the whole idea of redemption. But today while my wife and I were watching "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" (give it up for sweet-faced Bob Abernathy), they did a story on the revival of anti-semitism in Germany and quoted Faulkner who said, "The past is never dead; it's not even past." And if that's true, how's a guy supposed to change? I'm still dragging around the skinny, sickly, scared little kid with glasses, the devout teenager who thought he might want to be a priest (I know, the vows of chastity and obedience? who was I kidding?), the college dropout, the insecure husband, the deeply committed involved and terrified parent, the grad student, the therapy patient, the divorcee. All of those guys are rattling around in my head and body, which might help account for my somewhat rotund shape--about the only thing they're good for.

I can't help feeling sometimes that I need a mediator more than I need to go off (or in) in search of the sacred. I can't even tell if I know what that means: "the sacred."

But then, just when I'm about to give up, I look across my desk at the stack of papers and books on top of an old IBM Selectrix II typewriter I picked up at Goodwill a couple of years ago. It's heavy and metal and green--the typewriter I mean--and I had to chase all over town to find a typing element and ribbons for it. And I see this clean, white paper, 11x17, that I recycled from the trash at work. Beautiful, spotless paper. Unmarked. My eyes can almost feel the smoothness as they skim the surface of it. I can hear the sound that paper makes under your fingers, or the friction of it when you grasp a corner to turn the page. I see the glow of it, the lamplight bouncing off of it like the white-hot of a furnace.

Then I follow the grain of the wood on the surface of my desk, hear the rasp of my finger going over the whiskers on my unshaved face, feel the dull ache in my right knee sore from an evening run. You ever have those moments when you can see or hear or feel the outline of each object around you set off and separate in space and time?

I think when I say "the sacred," that must be what I'm talking about. At least I haven't found a better way to name it. But hell if I know where that fits into a pile of work on my desk at the office, a school potluck for one of my kids, enforcing a rule with another, laundry, cooking dinner, finishing some drywall repair in a bedroom, getting gas for the car and checking the tire pressure, and the ten thousand things that insinuate themselves into the space between one breath and the next, one thought and wild firing of synapses that gives birth to another.

I know tonight's done; I know tomorrow is Monday. We'll see what I manage to do with the next chance I have to get it right. Whatever traveling this pilgrim is going to do, it'll have to happen right here.

I got stuck yesterday, and I've been wondering why.

I tried, early in the morning, to sign on to the blog and create my next post, and found that my server was down and I couldn't get online. Every time I attempted to get to anywhere beyond my home page from the day before, I ran into one useless pop-up box or another. I fumed, I closed the boxes, I tried again and again to refresh my home page. Eventually I called the number for my internet service provider and got a recording telling me what I already knew: that my service was down for about the fourth time in the six months I've had it.

At that point, frustrated, I wandered through the house in the dim light. It was about six, and my wife was still sleeping. The light was just starting to rise outside. I thought about sitting down to write. After all, I had notes in the notebook that I carry around with me; I had a perfectly good word processing program on my computer; I had a jump drive with ample space for me to put my thoughts down, and I could always upload them to the blog whenever it was finally functioning again.

But I didn't do any of those things.

I sat in the living room and mumbled to myself about the shortcomings of my ISP. I looked on the shelves for books that I've never read that I really should get around to reading and began randomly pulling them down and browsing through them aimlessly. Finally, of course, I turned on the television but couldn't tell you what I watched during the time I killed until I had to take my shower and start getting ready for work.

Why didn't I spend that time writing? I know the satisfaction I feel when I do it; I know how good it is for me emotionally and mentally. But I let the insignificant interruption of not being able to post my writing keep me from writing at all.

I've been thinking a lot about the things I interpose between the myself and what I know nourishes me. There's a line in the Indigo Girls song, "Watershed," that says, "Better learn how to starve the emptiness and feed the hunger." But over and over again, I see myself doing the opposite: feeding the emptiness and starving the hunger.

I think it has something to do with the stories I create in my head about who and what I am. Earlier in my life, I thought it was best to get rid of those narratives, to just deal with reality. But somehow that's never seemed to happen. Whenever I think I'm starting from zero, just taking life as it comes, I find myself in a session of marathon television watching, or playing hundreds of consecutive games of Minesweeper or Solitaire. No, some guiding story always operates in how I live my life, whether I created it consciously or not, and it doesn't always have my best interests at heart.

I'm tempted to believe that I need to start all over again, create a completely new sense of myself. I would give myself all the attributes and goals I "should" have: more ambitious, more meticulous, more disciplined. But I'm also old enough to know that I can't start from scratch; I have to begin where I am. The question is, in that jumbled combination of experiences and values and quirks, what should stay and what should go? What do I cling to and what do I release?

I've come to believe that definitions can make all the difference in this struggle to create a story of myself that keeps me moving forward. For example, defining myself as a writer has always sustained me. But if my sense of what it means to be a writer hadn't evolved, I wouldn't be putting these words down now. I'd have concluded a long time ago that I would never fit the image of what a writer is supposed to be.

A pilgrim is always a traveler, and every traveler has to face these questions. What can I take with me on this journey? How much can I carry? What do I need right now and what can I pick up along the way? What will be most useful, most important? And what will I need to leave behind?

I learned from yesterday, if I didn't know it before, how much I need to sort through the possessions I've been carrying around in my mind and heart. I need to keep rewriting the story. Of course, on every trip I've ever taken, I've also made mistakes in my choices of what to carry. So I'm hoping that the journey itself, if I keep to it, will revise my story and help show me what I need to keep and what I need to let go. This morning my server is back up, and I'm writing again.

It was dark when I pulled myself out of bed to set up my profile and create this post. I could make out the shape of the mountains to the north and the curve of the trees around my house, and if I looked long enough, I could see stars beyond the light pollution of porch lights and streets lights. But for the most part, the world was covered in the deep, deep blue that shadow throws over everything.

Personally I'm a fan of the dark; I tend to be more careful when I'm not sure I can see in front of me. I walk more slowly, reach out more often, listen more intently for any information I can find about my orientation, where I'm going, where everyone and everything else sits. When it's dark, I hold more closely to the people I care about. And I know that I won't be able to see whatever's coming, so I accept the reality that sometimes my power to act extends only as far as waiting and hoping and having faith.

Of course, I get reckless in the daytime, when I can see clearly (or think I can). I fancy myself the master of my own universe (to my wife, sons, and friends, please try to suppress your laughter here), which means I inevitably get myself into trouble.

I hope, in this space, to track that tricky path I'm making for myself--or that's being made for me--through life. I have no idea where it leads or what will come of my journey through parenting, through marriage, through work. I find it useful to think of myself as a pilgrim, heading for a destination in the distance that I've never seen or been to. That place may be on the other side of the world (I hope not because I don't know how I'll afford the airfare) or it may be across my living room; it's already felt like a million miles and I know I have a long way to go. But I do believe that words are the best way to get me there. You're welcome to walk along with me for as far as you like.