Stupidity

I did something stupid today, or rather I realized that I did something stupid a couple of days ago. Without getting too specific, let's just say it involves not being careful about how I spend my money and how much I have to spend. Now, I'm going to have to admit to my wife the stupid thing I did, and figure out how to make up for it.

But none of that is the worst part. I'm most bothered by how it happened in the first place. I can say honestly and without any pride that I'm not, generally, a stupid person. I understand the importance of keeping track of money and other import possessions. I know how to add and subtract. I have all the intellectual skills I need to keep this and other bonehead mistakes I've made from happening.

Why, then, do they happen? Why do I do it?

Simply explained, I didn't take care. I didn't do what I knew how to do, what I knew I should do, and what would have prevented the mistake. Maybe I was in a hurry to do whatever else I was doing. Maybe it didn't seem important at the time. At some moment, though, I made a choice to act--or not to act--when I knew better.

I've seen these choices with others, people around me at home, at work, driving down the road. We make choices that we know have a decent chance of leading us into grief. Sometimes--often, even--we get lucky and nothing goes wrong. But often enough, we feel the sting of our stupidity and suffer the consequences. I would say it's like falling asleep at the switch, except that we're wide awake when we do it; I know I am.

Or am I? Does having my eyes open and my body moving mean I know what I'm doing? Does it mean I'm *conscious*?

I guess that's really what I'm talking about: consciousness. Awareness. Paying attention to the potential consequences of my choices while I'm in the act of making them rather than looking beyond those consequences to whatever sparkling trinket calls for my attention at the time: whatever new toy I want to buy or new movie I want to watch or tasty bit of food I must have or distraction I have to absorb to prevent me from feeling all those things at any given moment that I don't want to feel.

It could be that the first and most fundamental choice at any given moment is between awareness and distraction. Will I face myself as I am, with whatever unpleasantness that might entail, or will hide by burying my attention elsewhere? Lately for me, this question emerges most in my struggles with writing. I know that when I write I can't hide. I know that putting down words, no matter what I write about, will reveal what's going on inside me. All my fears and shortcomings will come out, either because I put them down or because I avoid them and then see the falseness in what I've written. I also know, and also avoid, what good might come out of me through writing. I know how much it frees me and makes me hopeful. But when I sit down with a blank page, I can't help thinking of the discomfort that it may take to get to that place of possibility. The fear rears up and I choose distraction instead of consciousness; I leave the page blank and find something else to do.

I'm not foolish enough to expect myself to be perfect, but I would like to be better. Instead of being aware, I now have to deal with the hangover from being oblivious. I feel like an idiot and that hurts. But if it wakes me up even a little bit, maybe it won't have been a complete loss. It woke me up enough to write this. Now the task is trying to stay that way.

Cold Morning

Winter has arrived at the desert, at least at night time. In the early mornings, such as now, I could almost think I'm back in Kansas. Almost. Usually I set my alarm for 5:30, but when the time comes, I turn off the ringer and lie awake with the covers pulled closer, occasionally drifting into sleep then jerking myself awake, afraid that I've overslept.

Then the sun finally climbs over the Rincon Mountains to the east, and the temperature creeps up--into the 70s today they say. I get up, wake my wife, and we begin the daily bustle, the circuit of food-work-tv-sleep again.

It seems, sometimes, that everything happens so slowly. It feels, sometimes, that on any given day, nothing will change, that in 10 years I will be in this same place with these same questions and concerns and insecurities. Or that new ones will have taken their place. As with the rounds we used to sing in elementary school where we each come in at different moments but sing the same lines over and over and over again, I feel as though I've heard the words before I even open my mouth.

But this morning, instead of staying in my warm bed, next to my wife, I climbed out, pulled on my robe. I moved around the house in the darkness so deep the air itself seemed to have a texture of grainy blue. I sat down here, as I've been meaning to do for months now, and started to write, even though I stared at the computer screen and checked the celebrity gossip and looked at the weather and browsed NBA scores for 45 minutes first.

Today, something changed. Maybe tomorrow, something will too. Maybe soon, it will begin to get warmer.

Circling Back

Saturday I went to my first Al Anon meeting in about three years. It came to me with a sharp clarity more than a week ago that I needed to go back, but I didn't know how it would feel. I wasn't sure what the sensations of stepping back into that skin would be.

For those who don't know, Al Anon is a Twelve Step program not for alcoholics but for friends and family of alcoholics--for those who have been affected by someone else's drinking. I suppose it might seem odd to some that people who *aren't* drinking would need their own program. For a long time, I didn't see the need myself. Of course, I recognized the difficulty of growing up in an alcoholic household, but I always figured that once I left home, I could put that past behind me. No alcoholic to deal with, no problem. It took me nearly 20 years to figure out it didn't work that way, at least not for me. Actually, it took me much less time to figure it out; it simply took me that long to decide to do something about it.

There are so many ways to think about how addiction works. Some people talk in terms of will power. Others consider addiction a moral failure, a sign of sin. For still others, it's about chemical imbalances and brain function or genetic predispositions. But my struggle with addiction has come down to facing relationships: of addict to substance, of addicts to other addicts, to family and friends, to themselves. For long stretches I've let myself pretend that this struggle came from other people not doing what they should do.

I know now that that's my addiction: trying to get people around me to do what I think they should so that I don't have to listen to the chaos and fear that constantly roar inside my head. The byproduct of my childhood spent living with an alcoholic is this scurrying anxiety just under the calm most people see. That's the deepest relationship at the root my wrestling with addiction. There is this stuff inside of me--or sometimes the feeling that there's nothing inside of me--which I have tried to relate to by ignoring it or by making everyone and everything "out there" in the world okay, orderly, pleasant and smiling. And when I can't put the world around me at ease, I become even more frightened because it makes the tumultuous world inside of me even more restless, more insistent.

I've known all this for years now; I learned it meeting by meeting during the five years I attended Al Anon regularly. But I had to be reminded of it, and that happened a few weeks ago during a dispute I kept having with my wife, trying to get her to deal with a problem in the way *I* thought she should deal with it. And when, in frustration and exasperation, I said I wouldn't bring it up again, that she'd have to deal with the issue herself, I experienced an unexpected relief and a realization that that's exactly what she *should* be doing, and that I should keep my mouth shut unless she asked for my help.

It was, in a way, like coming home--so familiar even though most of the faces were different. The meeting I used to attend had moved to another location, but I found it on a list at the Al Anon website. It was the stereotypical small church, multipurpose room with linoleum tile, low tables and chairs for children, and art projects on the walls. I recognized the expressions of fatigue, of anxiety, and also of relaxation and even happiness too. I recognized the chairs arranged in a circle with all of us facing one another, the brochures and literature spread out for people to take. Again, I joined the circle.

Ghosts

Tonight I'm thinking of ghosts. Not the kind you see, pale or white or looking as though they are draped in sheets. Not those of the low-pitched moan or the occasional shriek tearing through the night. The ghosts that I encounter most are aural, residing inside my skull.

What do I hear? Always I listen. Always trying to find something clear through the constant chatter and buzz playing like a radio tuned to several stations at once. The overlapping dialogue, the multiple tuggings at the sleeve like too many children calling for my attention. I don't mind so much sorting those out, though. What troubles me more is the steady whisper of defeat, of discouragement always hissing in my internal ear.

What do I hear? Before I sat down at the computer tonight, I looked at the CD shelf in our study. I hoped that music instrumental would prove instrumental, would feed something, silence something, lift something to the surface. But I still hear the hissing, the steady whisper so common I don't really distinguish it most of the time from the sound of the wind outside or the hum of the refrigerator or the burble of the television in the other room.

Two impulses have pulled me as long as I can remember in opposite directions. The first is the desire to explore the sensations I sort through constantly in my head. As far back as I can remember, the world has seemed to speak to me in its surfaces and its depths, in shadows and colors and blinding lights. Whenever I sit still long and don't let myself be distracted, the ordinariness of life slips away and I find a gleaming melody of experience to immerse myself within. If I only let it happen, if I only turn everything off for a minute or two, a shimmer rises like a tide and I can float or dive or roll in it for hours.

But the other impulse does distract me. It pushes and shoves and chastises me about letting my mind and heart explore. Its chief accusation is that I'm wasting time. No one, it says, has any real interest in my desire to drift and play through what I see and hear and feel and taste each day, each moment. This other voice points me to productive work like my job or chores about the house or socially acceptable interactions with friends and family and the thousand obligations of being human with other people, going out to dinner, catching a movie with friends, making sure I see this week's big game or the must-see episode of my favorite night time drama. My only value to the world, it tells me, is to be normal and interesting and entertaining in the ways most other people seem to seek to be. And these strange thoughts that pass through my mind deserve no more than a small corner every now then so long as they promise to behave, so long as I don't follow them too far or try to spread them or share them with others, so long as I don't devote any real time to them.

I wonder if every artist feels, as I do, like a criminal sometimes, like a pervert? I wonder if we all carry the guilt of our deviance? Maybe some get used to it. Maybe some learn to embrace it. I only know that for myself that until I find a way to embrace this strangeness, I'll always be a little crazy. I'll always be refereeing this wrestling match between demon and angel, never quite sure which is which, or whether they will both turn out to be me. These two ghosts that haunt me and won't let me sleep.

Thanksgiving

I'm thinking about another Thanksgiving a long time ago, 22 years to be exact, an eon in football time, when I sat in a friend's empty apartment, staring at the television all day. It was sunny outside, but cold, the light falling through east-facing windows in the morning, but slipping behind the shadow of the hill the apartment house sat on by mid afternoon. I was deeply depressed and didn't know it clearly yet, but I was just about to drop out of college and leave town.

Everyone else was gone for the holiday, so I was alone, which was what I preferred to be. But it also terrified me because I realized that I could just step out of life, could just stop working, talking, doing, thinking, maybe even feeling. I didn't want to die exactly, but I realized that you can live your life in such a way that you've reached the next best thing: nothing. And I wasn't sure that if I tasted that I would ever have the energy to go back to living again. Thankfully, as it turned out, I did.

Yesterday, my wife asked me if I could point to any accomplishments I was proud of. I know she would name to several things she believes I have achieved. I know she considers me accomplished. My mind clicked through events and goals I've set for myself and completed, honors or awards I've earned, diplomas, acknowledgments. But I'm not being modest when I say that I don't generally take any particular pride in them. I'm an educated man; I earn a decent living; I am doing a more than acceptable job of helping to raise two sons. My wife and I have even recently to purchase a house. All of these are notable milestones. I appreciate that I've managed to reach them.

I can't help thinking, though, of achievements in terms of what I leave behind when I'm gone. A few days ago, the director Robert Altman died. He was 81. His obituaries each listed a string of films--some successful, others not so much--than he completed. Ten years from now, or twenty years from now, I can walk into a video store (or a store for whatever medium they'll be putting movies on then) and see copies of the films he made and watch his handiwork.

When the journalist Ed Bradley died a couple of weeks ago, I had the same thought. I can see old videos of his stories, read about the events he covered and the people he interviewed, listen to his broadcasts as host of "Jazz at Lincoln Center." Whatever happens to his body, he has left behind a body of work.

But the only body I have is the one I inhabit right now, this container of flesh and organs and blood that will, in time, cease to function, decay, and eventually disappear. My name sits atop a few dozen stories that I wrote years ago when I was a journalist, stories buried in the archives of newspapers in a handful of cities where absolutely no one remembers me. Two or three columns, the same number of book reviews, a couple of short stories, a few pieces in academic anthologies, this is the sum total of my productivity over 45 and a half years of life. It's less than many have published but more than most. That isn't the problem.

The problem is that I know neither of those bodies really counts: the physical one or the textual one. The body that counts most is even more ephemeral. It consists of the choices that make up my life itself. It consists of what I do each day than can never be captured or recorded. It consists of the moral quality of everything I've said or done and the kind of person I will, in the end, have turned out to be. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow, but I don't believe that I can yet say what the quality of that life is; I can't say whether it is, on balance, commendable or ordinary or a catalog of missed opportunities. The difficulty of my life is the not knowing whether I'm getting it right at all.

On that day 22 years ago, I watched "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," and I laughed from my toenails to my ears, with my whole self, because I needed to laugh deeply and because there was absolutely nothing in that brief period between me and what I needed to do. And I watched Doug Flutie heave a prayer of a throw into the arms of a leaping teammate 50 yards down a soggy football field. I leapt and screamed and said "Wow." I watched it all in awe.

It's Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for the awe, the bits of it I've felt then and since. Maybe that is what I'm proudest of, that for a few moments in my life, I've been able to erase everything that doesn't matter and give myself a glimpse of just being alive. That's something to shoot for; that's something to achieve.

Obstacle Course

"It's not going to stop til you wise up."
Aimee Mann

I'm thinking a lot about writing these days. Thinking about it. I'm not doing much of it, not actually sitting down and putting words on the page, not even planning or scheduling or making time for it. No, I'm just thinking about it and wondering why I'm not doing it and considering what must be wrong with me.

Of course, I know better. I've been writing long enough to know that the only way to get it done is to put myself in situations where I'm likely to do it. I have to not turn on the television and park myself in front of it when I get home in the evening. Or I have to actually get up in the morning when my alarm goes off and the morning quiet is ideal for settling into words. At the very least, I have to actually pick up a pen and sit down with some paper.

In other words, I have to prepare and clear a space to do it, that is if I really want to do it.

I even have experience with this. I've reached the point where I do that with my running, no matter what. When I've taken a couple of long weekend trips this summer, I've made sure I brought my shoes and running clothes and figured out where I could run. Yesterday evening, when errands meant I couldn't run at my regular time, I simply accepted it as a given that I'd have to run later, even though it meant getting home and having dinner later. I do what I need to do to run when it's time.

All of which makes me wonder what it is that keeps me from doing the other things I say I want to do. Right now, writing is chief among them, but this also includes eating in a healthier way. It's as though somewhere in the bowels of my being I have set for myself an obstacle course. Some part of me keeps insisting that I prove something, that I have to earn whatever fulfillment I want, some part of me that believes I don't deserve fulfillment.

So insteading of smoothing the path, instead of helping me prepare in a sane way, this demanding self mis-directs me; it offers me inducements to ignore the things that are really essential. I call this part of me demanding because it's the same voice that berates me for not writing more, for not eating better, for not taking time for silence.

These seemingly competing selves inside me puzzle me sometimes. I know that somewhere there's a place where they are joined, where they don't work at cross purposes. I want to get to that place. But I know I won't get there by thinking and wondering. I can only get there by taking the steps that make me feel whole: running, writing, devoting time to breathing and spiritual silence. I have to run the obstacle course, as I did this morning, and get to the empty page, get to the road, get to myself.

Keep to Small

Accepting oblivion is the challenge I find myself facing these days. Time erases us all eventually; and even when the most famous of names linger--Jesus, say, or Shakespeare or Mohammed or Confucius--the details that were the experiences of their lives have evaporated: the smells and tastes they felt, the texture of their skin, the light or shadow in the eyes are lost to us forever.

How much more so for those of us only ordinarily known? The world will little note nor long remember, Lincoln said. Within a century and a half at most, everyone I've ever known will be, like me gone. I know, this isn't the sort of thing most people like to dwell on, but I can't seem to help myself.

This reality used to make me want to build skyscrapers, move a nation, create monumental works that everyone would know throughout the ages. Or, when I saw the unlikelihood of all that, I got depressed. But now, at 45, I've stumbled on a new response: less. Less ambition, less achievement, less notoriety. As it says in an old Japanese story about a boy wandering alone through a countryside ravaged by a demon, "Avoid large places; keep to small."

More and more I find myself absorbed (as much as the duties of life will allow) by the ephemeral, by what can never be recorded or preserved. Each time I run, I revel in the unrepeatability of the experience. I take each step, and it disappears forever in the wake of the next step, and the next. Each breath is an extinction.

The writing goes best when, at the end of each entry, I release what I've made. Of course, I still believe very much in polishing and revising what I write, but generally now I want to make my writing smaller, not larger, than it was. I want to burnish each one, piece by piece, then let them accumulate into whatever pattern they will--or not. Right now, a pile suits me as much as a mosaic; I'm more intrigued these days by what I find rather than what I make.

I'm convinced that each moment, when you look at it correctly, gleams. Then it's gone, but if you take that moment, the gleam is there. I want to be able to go that slowly and have that little that I can take the time to see.

But who'll pay me to sit on my rear end and do that? So I bustle about, trying to catch my naps from busy-ness when I can. I know that a lot of people would call my attitude "giving up" or "quitting on life," etc., etc. Until you've tried it, though, you have no idea how delicious stepping off the treadmill of expectation can be.

The hard part, or course, is that when you strip away the weight of the "oughts," you're left with yourself. I'm still getting used to that, and learning to beg the forgiveness of all those who have to live with this oddly preoccupied, remorselessly strange person I am. I'm still pretty bad at being me. It helps, though, to come to the realization that that small task really is an acheivement worthy of a lifetime. Somehow, it makes it easier for me accept--even celebrate--that someday that life will be gone.

Spirit and Flesh

For a long time now, words have interested me as a place where the body and spirit meet. My body makes it possible for me to articulate words: to say them aloud (or hear them), to sign them in the air with my fingers, to write or type them on a page or computer screen.

Yet words are also spiritual creatures; they only mean what they mean because we believe they do, and agree in that belief with others. And like all spiritual things, language is larger than me as an individual. It existed before me and will continue long after this body of mine has turned itself into nourishment for the earth and air. I can contribute to langauge in meaningful ways with what I write and say, but in the end words transcend me; they are a stream all their own in which, in my lifetime, I will dip only my small cup.

I find myself thinking about this because I'm considering the words I and others now use to talk about my body. These months of running have changed my physical shape and the ways people name the body they see when they look at me.

Clothes I used to wear now sag and billow on my frame, so much so that I've had to start acquiring a new wardrobe. My posture has altered, my lungs work more easily (even when I run hard), and my toenails are a bit more bruised than they used to be.

The words others use deal speak mainly about the weight I've lost. They talk admiringly of how "thin" or "skinny" I've become, and I certainly enjoy hearing that; I'd even like to lose more. But more than that single measure, I like what I can do with body that I haven't been able to for decades. My skin feels better on me. My legs can carry me farther and faster that I would have thought possible a year ago, and my only desire to lose weight now is so that I can become faster. I've regained a strength and stamina I thought I'd lost forever. I eat and sleep better, and drink hardly at all, not from prudishness but a sheer lack of desire.

The word I use to describe myself isn't "thin" but "healthy." What sense of what that word really meant has shifted. Suddenly, I find different words meeting and speaking to my body, and I find my body embracing them, changing in response to them. These new words have altered my sense of the relationship between this "self" and these muscles and bones and blood; the physical change has released new words on the page, including these.

Together, the body and the words have carved out a new spiritual space in which I'm trying to keep moving, to keep writing. Suddenly, more seems at stake, and sometimes I worry that (1) I'm becoming increasingly insufferable or (2) whatever sense I'm making isn't coming through to anyone else, including those I love most, or both. In this new vocabulary and space, I've come to think that that's what healthy means. It isn't weight or words but a coming together. The mystery is to discover what words will emerge next.