Look out 'cause here I come

We are trying to consolidate, clean-up, and generally organize all of our stuff.  I came across some boxes that had "memory" things in them, you know, like old letters, cards we saved, etc.  Danielle even found the dress she wore in her junior high's production of Little Shop of Horrors.  She tried it on and it fit, so she left it on for a while she sorted her stuff.

Eventually I found a box within a box that had my old writings.  I've spent the time since then trying to process some of the things I've found.  I have been embarrassed of them, proud of them, nostalgic for a time when I felt creatively productive; I really have run through a lot of feelings in attempts to reconcile the me now with the me then.  The same thing happened with this blog: I feel exposed, but to whom?  There is nothing wrong with writing, nothing wrong with putting feelings to paper and expressing oneself.  And I would tell everyone to try it.  But when I see my own attempts, it's embarrassing!  Even more bizarre is that I'm embarrassed for myself, to myself.  No one else is judging or likely even reading.

It's like my ego wants to decide that we shouldn't hang out with that 19 year old kid who was madly in love and questioned God and swore his allegiance to his girlfriend of 15 months if "God allows us to be together."  Twenty years later, I am trying to distance myself from that "me" but cannot figure out why.  I mean, I know why:  the writing is juvenile, the author immature.  The writing is earnest but shrouded in metaphor and religious undertones that confuse.  It's a journal but clearly meant to be read by an audience.  An author seeking an audience is pitiful.

I wonder if that's part of my current discomfort:  I know how those written prayers were/weren't answered.  I know how the story finishes.  I know that kid doesn't end up with that girl.  I know that praying for redemption because "this time I slipped and let Satan win" doesn't work.  I have seen how that chapter ends, and how the subsequent chapters end, and though the book is still being written some of the conceits that guided that author then eventually fall apart.  The scribblings in the margins of the looseleaf notebook that point to the Judeo-Christian God and ask Him questions eventually become just scribblings.

So maybe the discomfort comes from wondering if the time was wasted or misdirected?  What worries me more is that I'm judging me as an artist, as someone who earnestly was trying, and years of trying to be cool has taught me that earnestness isn't cool.  People who are earnest are suckers.  Unless you can turn and wink at the camera saying, "I know, isn't this all lame!" then you aren't cool. IT'S SUCH A FLAWED MINDSET but I can totally see myself slipping into it.

One of the smarter instructors I had in nursing school for Human Growth and Development quoted someone as saying "there is nothing more shameful than the phase we've just grown out of."   What I do when I judge me, though, is rob myself of the now.  If I am projecting how I will interpret myself 5, 10, 20 years in the future, I am taking from the me today the opportunity to be fully human.  The experience of consciousness includes earnestness, joy, shame; all of it.  And I cannot let myself be dampened by people's perception of me ESPECIALLY IF THAT PERSON IS ME.

Physiologically every cell in my body has been replaced since I wrote some of those things, seemingly I am a "new" person anyway. Somehow, some way, the undying light that is "me" continues on.  The mind that is judging me (past, present, and future) doesn't work, though, and is flawed.  It serves to protect itself, advance itself, and exists for itself.  And in this instance, it is working against the "me" that wrote those things.  The same me that writes these things.

I don't entirely know how to not be embarrassed by the younger me, but I sure as hell admire his devotion, and passion, and ability to keep creating.  I wish I could tell him that the relationship ends but that eventually he'll meet an amazing girl and marry her and have three amazing children and that maybe he'll find out God is dead or maybe God is alive but he shouldn't worry about his emotional response.  He should feel those things because earnestness is cool and it's more shameful to have attempted to curate an image based on fear than to have lived and experienced it all.

The me that wrote was young and naive and immature.  So what?  It should read as this: "The me that wrote/writes was/is conscious.  I am conscious.  I am."

Get back to where you once belonged

I've been meditating every morning before I do anything else.  It's an interesting thing.  Every session I've done has been guided with the assistance of either Insight Timer or Headspace.  If I were just to set a timer and sit I have a suspicion my mind would capitalize on the silence and perseverate.  Some times I'm shocked at how quickly the time passes and other times I'm fighting to maintain any sense of focus (or non-focus, depending on how you look at it).  But I don't feel like it's taking anything away from my day and it does seem to help set a tone for the day, a tone of intentionality.

One thing I've been working on this week is viewing my kids as their own creatures.  It's stupid to view them as my agents, or as working against me or for me in the flow of life.  I'll probably murder this quote, but I heard this week that we don't look at a tree and get angry at it for leaning a certain way or being more green on one side, we just accept it.  And yet I can't do that with my children.  They are like those trees, leaning or tilting one way and if my reaction is to stifle that growth, it will likely frustrate me and them.  I'm not sure how this translates to day-to-day life and the very real fact that "we are running 15 minutes late and why don't you even have your underwear on yet because I know for a fact you were wearing it 30 minutes ago?!?" but directing mindfulness towards that just might result in less of a stress response, less of a panicky feeling, less of an anger response that could damage who we are as a little community.  In any case, I feel it's worthy of an attempt.

Still reading "Power of Now."  Ordered Ram Dass' "Be Here Now" which maybe I'm not ready for and will stumble into later.  Despite my best attempts to intellectualize this process, I'm trying to just accept it as it is.

All we have is now

Exposing one's self through writing is not something I'm used to.  It's easy to get cerebral about the whole thing and hear my voice changing for an imagined audience or perceived reader when in fact, I want to write for me.  For the me that is saying the words in my head and hearing them, not for anyone else.  But I am a harsh critic of myself and want to add disclaimers and footnotes that let me know that I'm in on the joke, that "I get what he's doing here" and that that wink and a nod absolves me of any of the trappings that come along with it.

So, without further ado, Michael's brain, here is your disclaimer: I grant you permission to write freely, to process your words and thoughts in a setting that might or might not be read by other people, but can be a safe place to enjoy the now.  The "you" of now needs to do this, feels a compulsion to revisit a 10-year old blog and it's not important why.  And also, dear Michael's brain, you will kill the specimen if you dissect it further.  Enjoy the process and be here now.

I've been listening to Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now." It comes on the heels of reading Pete Holmes' "Comedy Sex God" which was unlike any memoir I've read before.  I went into it thinking I was going to read a humorous account of an ex-Evangelical comedian and emerged from the other side having an entirely different perspective on the human experience and perception and time and space and it all.  It blew my mind.  I cried reading it.  I laughed at some parts and cringed at others.  But his search for understanding resonated with me.  And at the end of the book he recommended further titles and "The Power of Now" was one of them.  I finished "Comedy Sex God" in a few days; "The Power of Now" requires all of my brain to process and I can only handle a few minutes of listening every so often.

I can't just hear phrases like "Time is an illusion" and continue on my day.

I've been ruminating on those words and others like them and every so often I'll have a flashback of the church I grew up in, Pastor Kent speaking from the pulpit and saying things like "Pray without ceasing" and then currently wondering if maybe, just maybe that ties to a guru's mantra.  (Pete Holmes made that connection for me; it's not an original thought.  It's probably not even his original thought.)  Or I'll remember myself crouched over a Bible on the APU campus reading Christ's words to "consider the lilies of the field" to know that they don't worry and wishing and praying that I wouldn't worry about things.  Then I'll flash-forward to the present and hear Tolle saying the "ego" is a creature that feeds on the past and projects into the future but causes pain and I'll wonder if maybe just maybe Christ was an enlightened guru who understood these things and was trying to guide people towards something inside themselves, a true spirit that is free of worry and doubt and the trappings of conscious thought.

And then I hear my thoughts and realize, "My God, I've become a goddamned hippy."

It's difficult for my analytical mind to understand some of this.  The part of me that worships the accuracy of language and logic and reason and thought cannot comprehend how to accept the language (let alone the meaning behind the thought!) that these exercises encourage.  The metaphors that abound are repugnant to my erudite sensibilities.  People who traffic in these words sound ridiculous.  Here is an actual Eckhart Tolle quote: "What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am.  Who am I then? The one who sees that."

What a crock of shit!  How does that make sense?  How can one tease apart that sentence to mean anything?

And yet...

And yet, it was those words that made me weep.  I cannot hide the visceral reaction that the "me" who saw that sentence had.  According to the book of Acts, when Saul was on his way to Damascus he ran into a ghost of Jesus who made him feel real bad about persecuting Christians and he was blinded (Michael Schoon translation of the Bible).  After three days, a nice man came along and prayed and "something like scales fell from his eyes" and he could see again.  He changed his name to Paul and then did other stuff (still my translation).  And now the phrase "scales from fell his eyes" is used to represent a rebirth or a moment of clarity on which one can hinge their life.

What I mean is, it is entirely human to have a physical response to something as you confront the "truth."  In this case, I responded to something I didn't (don't?) understand and am drawn towards it.  I can't explain it, I don't have words for it, and the words I do have make me sound stupid.  I'm not used to sounding stupid.  But I'm willing to now and maybe that is one of the differences.

The me behind the actions and words and occupations and titles and personality tests is there.  And the spark of consciousness (or whatever it's called) is amazing and wonderful and somehow connected to the rest of the universe in ways I can't know/understand/believe right now and maybe I never will.  But if I can grasp a fraction of it, if I can appreciate the now and live in the now and begin to drink in the connection I have to stars and trees and people who are all made of the same scienc-y stuff, I will be an active participant in this life.  That's what I want to be: an active participant.

Do you love me, do you, surfer girl?

I don't like apologizing for not posting. I'm the real victim, as my thoughts haven't been summarily cataloged since I last said anything in this form Whatever.

So the boy is almost two. That happened. Time is relative, I suppose, and I am beginning to understand that much of parenting is trying to forget the terrible moments and clinging to the good ones. The rest of parenting is realizing that in the long run, the universe fades to black, so this 8 minute car ride home with a screaming 2o-month

old in the back seat will also end. I suppose I'm not as sentimental as some parents and not as pragmatic as others. It's hard to wax poetic but I feel like a parent who doesn't is selfish or grumpy or just plain depressed. I have great times with The Boy. There, I said it.

Work is well. I wish that in nursing school I had learned what the role of nursing was; that is, the patient advocate, the doctor's eyes and ears, the family liaison, etc. But I don't think I could have learned that without doing it. So I'll keep doing it until I figure it out and then make profound speeches at dinners out and such.

I guess there is more to write but there never is. It's all been done. Except this.

Also, here is a picture of us now.

All around me are familiar faces, worn out places...

Okay. So here's what happened: we had a boy and named him Robby. So far, he's been pretty cool. He cried a lot when he tried to sleep for about 6 months, we "trained" him, then he got better. And then we got better. He started sleeping more and so did we. This taught me one thing: parents are as crazy as their child's sleep schedule. The first few months were a blur.

But now he's an amazing kid, which is exactly what a parent should say. So how to quantify that? He's pretty much the only thing in this world I would willingly die for. Does that make him or me unique? No.

So I graduated with a degree in nursing and got a job. And somehow, now, it feels insignificant. I know that for the rest of my life I will be a nurse, but it just doesn't seem as important as being a parent. And if I had read or heard those words before I had a kid, it wouldn't have made sense, because the measurement of how good a parent one is seems to be how good one's child is, which I know isn't fair, but how else to determine it? Results are results. Despite that, I think it's safe to say it's impossible to be the best parent ever. Even good parents have crappy kids. And all of this logic might lead one to follow the writer of Ecclesiastes who said, "Everything is meaningless..." Which it might be. One of the major problems about believing in nothing is that you'll fall for nothing.

I know this is getting a bit loquacious, but my point is this: even if everything is meaningless in some cosmic sense, it matters to me now. And that is what matters. And I think that if everyone could have that mindset, and respect that everyone else has that mindset, things would be better.

Enclosed please find a picture of my sister and her husband.

Michael

Sweet Child of Mine

Dear son:

I think it's important for you to have a glimpse into my mind in the days leading up to your delivery, so I've decided to put a few thoughts into 1's and 0's and forever immortalize them on the internet. You can ask yourself: was my dad a narcissist? And the answer is clearly yes. But more than that, I'm curious as to what MY father was like before I knew him and though I can intellectualize that he was probably similar to the man I met in my teens (or how I view him now), there is something about my presence in this life that has changed him.

So here is my attempt at what life was like without you as well as little nuggets of advice that will probably be pretentious.

1) The world was overall pretty odd, but from what I understand, that's nothing new. Politicians are fighting about taxes and Tea Parties and health care and how they're all corrupt. And again, from what I understand, that's old news. So this is where your dad stands on everything related to politics: everyone can be bought, politics IS a popularity contest, and the United States is still one of the greatest nations on Earth. Why? I can vote however I want, swear at whoever I want, and own whatever I can afford. And that's nice.

2) Your mom and I haven't been to church since Christmas and before that, we hadn't gone in several years. Maybe we're bitter, maybe we're jaded, maybe we just don't know any better, but we also like sleeping on Sundays. Feel free to choose whatever path you want, just don't compromise who you really are (whatever that means to you). As near as I can tell, the sun comes up every day and it rains on the just and the unjust.

3) I love your mom a lot. If it ever seems like I don't, remind me that I do.

4) We did a lot of fun stuff before you got here but I don't really resent you for us having to change that. We waited for a long time before having you and the reason we waited was because we were selfish. We wanted to do everything we could before having the additional responsibilities of kids. We've traveled, gone to concerts and plays (ask your mom about the time we tried to go to Lion King twice), played a ton of video games, gardened, fixed the house and broken the house and overall, we lived the life we wanted to. So life before you was just what we wanted and we expect that life with you will be better. Don't let me down.

5) We want you here. We wanted you here. This was a wonderful time in our lives to bring a child into the world and so we did. That's how we roll. We've found that if we want something, we have to plan for it, work for it, and then get it. There aren't a lot of shortcuts in life and if you find one, great, but don't count on them.

6) Being a teenager is hard.

7) When I was born, my parents threw out all their old records that they thought weren't for kids. I felt like I missed out on so much good stuff. I mean, Dad tossed Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, and a host of other amazing music that I had to discover on my own. I resented him for it, but now understand: they wanted me as protected as possible. If you ever think we are entirely lame for whatever line in the sand we draw (no dating until 16 or no R-rated movies until you're 9 or no swearing in the house), just know that at one point, we didn't really care about those things and just want to protect you. And while it's true we are lame, we have sacrificed something to make you the coolest kid we know.

8) I should have composed a rough draft of this.

9) Technology is never a salvation. Make sure you control it, not the other way around. And whatever you do, make sure you can sync your calenders with your mobile device.

10) When you fall in love, it will seem like no one understands just how much you love this person. But that's because they have probably experienced it too and know that that feeling doesn't last forever. Just enjoy it anyway, but protect your heart and the heart of the other person. As Outkast says, "If what they say is nothing lasts forever, what makes love the exception?"

11) Before you got here, we mostly slept in on weekends, went out to eat once a week, watched a lot of TV, walked the dogs, and worked or studied. I played a lot of Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3, read a little, and messed around with projects (most recently replaced the garbage disposal). Your mom read magazines, worked, and watched tv. I'm sure she did more than that, but all I can remember is the last month of pregnancy, when she was mostly waddling everywhere and exhausted from carrying your chunky butt around.

It's odd, but we already love you and can't really explain the bond we have with you. I suppose that's the mystery of humanity and the beautiful enigma of having language to try and describe what we feel. So that's that: We love you.

Recommended reading list

I found something that should be read before Robby gets here.