This morning I am standing in the kitchen I grew up in – in the house I grew up in, with my mom – She lives here too. Or, as she reminded me this morning, it’s her house. I’m making lunch as she grinds me down to a nub about some dishes I left in the sink. I’m not sure exactly what she’s upset about because you see, I’m not listening. When she starts talking this way, I do the same thing I did when I was in High School, which is that I play heavy metal “tapes” in my head. That strategy worked wonders back then, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t still work pretty good. I would like to be present for my mom, because that would be productive and enlightened…the way I like to do relationships these days. The truth is that we get along well most of the time, but we reach some tipping point, some critical mass about every four days, where she needs to vent about something other than what is really bothering her. She picks a target, spews a few hurtful words, and then retreats back into her calm malaise. I feel that surge of energy shooting up my center, bite back my harsh response, and crank up the tunes in my head, which is the equivalent of plugging my ears and yelling LALALALALALA! That was what we did before heavy metal came along, right?
It is not easy for any two adults to live together, but it is even harder for us to live with our parents after being, you know, out in the world. I’m 42 and I live with my mother – this is not something I list on my dating website profile. It doesn’t matter that NPR reports that lots of people my age are doing it. It doesn’t matter that having been self-employed for the last 5 years, and battered by a shitty economy – the worse recession since the great depression - for the last two, has forced this kind of personal retreat of mine. This is not something that a man wants to lead with in any kind of public way. Granted, it’s only been a couple of weeks this time. Last year, I stayed for a year and a half. Last year, I had a plan, and it almost worked. This year, I’ve got jack. I’ve got ZERO. It’s a good ZERO, but my mom hasn’t quite mastered this concept yet.
The truth is, I do have a plan. But, right now, I’m standing in the kitchen, trying to make my food, and her toxic goo is splashing all over me. She’s just starting to bash through my invisible force-field, when I begin to realize what is really happening. You see, she won’t say that she heard me booking my train-ride to Ashland, where I will be commencing a nine-day bike tour back down to Sacramento. She won’t say that she has heard me planning and scheming about this trip, and about Burning Man, and about my trip to Washington DC in the fall to ride the C&O / GAP trail. She won’t say it, but hearing all this activity in the FUN department strikes her as something other than a 42 year-old man getting his shit together and getting "back on his feet," which is what any responsible 42 year-old man is supposed to be doing, right? Is she doubting my focus and resiliency? Is she resenting all of my hootenanny? Maybe she is just in a bad space this mornng. That’s the way family works sometimes…you just have to guess what the problem is.
When I was a kid, we took a trip across the country in a little foreign car that my dad bought just for the trip, because it was 1979 and gas had surged to 68 cents per gallon or something outrageous like that. It was the oil crisis, and this small car was a new thing for us. It was an Opel, which is French for FIAT I believe. We traveled to New York City to visit family – all the aunts and uncles who used to pinch the crap out of my cheeks when I was a 4 year-old fat and adorable little tyke. On this trip, I was twelve, and driving across the continent was a great adventure. On the return trip, my parent’s decided to take us to Mount Rushmore, so we shot up through Wisconsin and over to South Dakota.
About the time we entered the Badlands, something went wrong with the clutch, and the car would not shift out of 1st gear. It was the thick of summer – probably 105 degrees out, and this was pre-global-warming weather. Did I mention that this little car had no air conditioning. There is something very special about rolling down the highway in 1st gear, in blistering hot conditions, trapped in a car with your family. Actually, it was a kind of shared misery that bonded us pretty well. We stumbled into Rapid City, and my dad, being an experienced auto mechanic, and having had plenty of time driving at 25 miles per hour to diagnose the issue, decided that we needed a pilot bearing. Whatever it was, it became quickly clear that only an Opel dealer would have the part. We pulled up to the Buick-Opel dealer at 3:30pm on a Saturday afternoon, and were stunned and moved to gratitudinal wonder, when the sales department called the parts manager in from his weekend at home, to sell us the part.
But what happened next is something that has helped shape me as a man forever more – has formed the core of my work ethic, the basis of my resourceful nature, and a fundamental sense that I can do just about fucking anything. I watched and often helped my dad, as he jacked up the little car, laid on the near-molten pavement in the parking lot of this dealership, and dropped the tranny out onto his chest, to complete the required clutch repairs. Over the next two days, I passed him tools, held the flashlight, and drank with pride, the free sodas brought to us by the guys in the sales department of that dealership. They knew my dad didn’t have the money to pay for the clutch repairs, and they were kind enough to allow him the space in the parking lot. Roundabout Monday, when the car was all back together and we were packing up to go, the service manager, a guy named Conrad Knudsen, right there on the spot, offered my dad a job as journeyman mechanic.
If my mom doesn’t understand what the hell I am doing right now, I am confident she would at least know a bit about who I am in this world - maybe have some respect for the man she helped raise. And, the truth is that she does. She knows I am a hard worker. She watched me build my business with a honda civic hatchback, a few Craftsman tools and a Craigslist ad, to a point where I was working fifty to sixty hours per week, and living pretty large, when there was time for living. She has witnessed my resourcefulness in the months when I was so broke I couldn't buy a bag of farts, and my carefully settling all of my debts, at a time when many are defaulting. I wish that I could say she is fully aware of my various other pursuits, achievements, and passions, but the blue-collar sense of limitation in which she has lived provides limited context for such understanding. This blue-collar sense of limitation (that I have had to unlearn) dictates that one does what is necessary to survive - You climb up there and lower yourself into the open jaws of Capitalism, and as you are slowly digested, you toss out the dreams and passions that you mistakenly brought with you - they are not digestable. Actually, I believe she does understand this, after loosing my father to cancer at the age of 58. She knows the stock from which I come, and she has been very supportive most of the time. I don’t think I need to defend my motives to her as she observes my current excursions into hedonistic weightlessness. But if I were going to bother with that, I know what I would tell her.
I would tell her that this is a time of great opportunity. We don’t get to be zeroed out many times in our lives, and when we are, the best thing we can do is invest in ourselves – not materially, but in our souls, in heart-expanding experiences that are going to help us take our lives to the next level. I would explain that this process needs to be nurtured and supported, and it is different for everyone. I could even explain that, in spiritual terms, to zero out means to assume a Wu Chi posture. Wu Chi posture is a foundational posture of Tai Chi, and it’s a kind of zero point; reflective, receptive, open, and energetically neutral. In yoga, they call it Savasana. It’s a restorative posture, not just of rest, but of return to self. From this posture, we are free to move in any direction, and our senses are most available to the intuitive offerings of the universe.
It’s kind of unnerving, the way these existential frictions transcend the who, what, where, and why, and tend to focus on the “how” of living. When it comes to HOW I am living, it is clear that I have a hard time not being invested in something positive and productive. This gets back to my previous point about being nervous with so much freedom. I have a hard time running in neutral. Some of this comes back to the old-fashioned work ethic that I received from my father. “If there’s time to lean, then there’s time to clean.” How many times have I heard that?
There seems to be a sense of identity that naturally develops with being invested in something, as we grind away, cultivate and vision the terms. There is also clearly a sense of escapism - escaping of the present moment, as one leans into the future. I personally don’t have much use for identities at this moment, but some weak part of me can dig the escape part. I have always been drawn to escaping. I keep catching myself tilling the soil compulsively, making sure that I am making sure that something…anything will break loose and begin flowing in the direction that I want my life to be flowing. This character trait has served me well in the past, but it has been revised of late, like some kind of software program called BE HERE NOW has been installed on my hard-drive. An identity to hang my hat upon, like “graduate student” or “Peace Corps volunteer” would be comforting, but it would also narrow my field, and right now, I am all about wide. I'm about wide field, and I'm about forward trajectory.
The important distinction that I now make is that a forward trajectory is not about earning and consumption, not even about career development per se…a forward trajectory for me is about fulfillment, spiritual evolution, testing myself, and fully expressing the gifts that I have been given. It's about loving more, and more deeply. I don’t know exactly when that idea finally clicked into place for me, but it has, in a big way. It's a new spin on that old-school, blue-collar work-ethic that my father gave me. Thanks Dad.
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