A year in review. a little anyways.

Well, its about 30 minutes to midnight on the eve of a very strange year. 

I was just chatting with my house-mate about how the world of last new years felt like a whole different life. We were different people. 
I suppose we aught to be. 

This spring I worked on a few projects: 

1. a boat

2. a guitar

3. calling friends on the phone more

4. therapy

It's in the last of these that I really started to dig into some issues I've been dealing with for some time. Honestly, I don't know if here and now is the time or place to try to explain the patterns I was working on, but I'll tell you about my last therapy session. 

After a lot of time being practically unable to accept a version of myself that didn't match with the ultra-version I had constructed in my mind, I finally was able to contrive a solution that gave me permission to step into alternate possibilities. Thus, rather than my problem being fixed, or being told that I'd never function in relationships, the breakthrough came when I stopped judging myself so harshly and gave myself freedom to be myself, whatever that means. 

As I write this, I'm reminded of a song. Hang on, I'm going to try and find it, put it on the speakers. 
There it is. Come as You Are by Tenille Townes. 
I loved hearing this song on the radio. I remember that I parked at work and left it on in the car to play out blasting loudly. I loved how it evoked Billy Graham and the "Just as I am" refrain. It reminded me of his legacy through his son and how perhaps there were always some limits on what that means. I loved how the song joyfully pushed that shit down and used a very similar refrain against the exclusion that evangelicals so often give power to. 

And yet it's hard to always take on this spirit of freedom. This year a lot of us have had to go easy on ourselves, and cut ourselves some slack. We don't need to be perfect, and in fact we are beautiful flawed creatures. Imagine God's grace and then imagine more than that. I don't even know if I believe it, but if I believe something, I want it to be that. I want it to be severe love. 

And yet today has been tough. I like to create little narratives for myself around moments like a new year where my story feels like its turning the page to a new chapter. The last one is tied up nicely, the new one laid out unencumbered. But I did feel encumbered, and I didn't feel fresh. I didn't feel like I had adequately turned over a new leaf and I didn't feel like it would be a new world tomorrow. I felt like I had made terrible mistakes, I felt like a mess, I felt depressed, I felt shame. 
Then I spent some time chatting with my roommate (conversation, the great healer)
and having drank some wine (the great feeler) 
and having listened to some music (the great emoter)
and having looked at some old photographs (the great evoker)

I think I may just survive January and thrive in February and in grace, rage and a daring hope perhaps even curry some courage in 2021. 
Surely we need it now. 

It's almost midnight, and with that I leave one moment from 2020. 

I had departed from Quadra island with three accompanying friends, in three accompanying kayaks when we saw the mist blast from the sea. 
The moment a humpback breaches is a moment one could live and die inside. Yet I was left to keep on living, looking for moments and realizing that they are gifts. 

In gratitude we take one step after another. 
In grace we stand. We stand upright to look one another in the eye, to say the words we feel we don't deserve, but desperately need to hear. 

The disparity of my life and the life on the planet

Dec 31st again. 

Its been a good year. Actually, as I think back, for me it has been a very good year. A rough patch here, a tough bit there, but its been good. I enjoyed playing music and creating songs in the first part of the year as I lived in Victoria, I worked two seasons at the Outdoor School, and I recently started working as a Teacher on Call at a pleasant private school in Vancouver. I co-operated a flower growing and selling enterprise, I met a lot of new people and I saw a Humpback Whale breach gloriously from one of my many ferry rides. There’s been some magic. 

There’s also been some angst. 

I’ve come to accept- well I guess I’ve been coming to accept and am still accepting- that climate change is going to be really really bad. 

It says something when the people who seem to have done good research on the topic and who I generally trust to have a good sense of what is going on tell me that they think we’re screwed. I mean, it seems that the vast majority of top scientists in the field agree that we are either screwed or very very very screwed. 

I sat down with a very intelligent and very educated friend recently, who has been doing work on the interaction of climate change and migration. This friend said that those in power basically aren’t as smart as we might believe, that politically the world is set to get increasingly volatile in coming years, and that “we’re fucked.”

People have been using the word hope a lot recently, and I do think that hope is an active thing that can keep us moving when we are faced with realistic defeat and the despair that accompanies. “Hope” however, too often seems like a substitute for “optimism,” which, of course, we often see as a positive trait too. But in this case, if it means hoping for the best, watching others to little and doing little ourselves, it might also mean delusion. I agree that the new concept to hold onto might be “courage,” which, in this case, i take to mean accepting the pretty-overwhelming likelihood that we will lose to climate change very very badly but that we will stand up and fight it at personal cost anyways.

I say this, but am i actually prepared to live it? I feel like a lot of the blog posts i’ve done in the past are about carving out my story on the world- which is a pretty privileged place to be, since it suggests that i have power over my situation in life. But now the world might push up against my sensibilities, ask me to be carved into a story rather than carve, which might feel powerless, but what is left after i push back, back off or get pushed down might simply be my convictions- and I suppose I’m a little concerned about what will show. Maybe this is why its easy to make excuses; in addition to the fact that the reality is hard to swallow, when it comes down to it, this thing might test my metal, and i don’t know if i want it to. 

This is hard stuff to process, and I think I might start a new blog to do so. No promises right now, but maybe I'll put a link to it here on this blog if/when that occurs. 

Why not? One for 2018.

So. It is the eve of another calendar year, one which sees me sitting at home with a strong beer not planning to take the party far from where I now sit. What would I expect to happen if I went out? What would I expect to happen to change the course of my journey, which, in itself is more gradual than the drop of some balloons or a strange kiss and richer at that.

A bit over a year ago I got out of renting in Vancouver and moved into a minivan I purchased. It was, perhaps, one of the most singular impactful choices I have made in recent memory. And to think, it was one that I made out of some sense of anger, frustration, and unwillingness to accept status quo. Perhaps that's lesson one. The next lesson, however, is also valuable, and the reason, I suppose, that I choose to start a post to sum a year about living in a van. It is this: if what seemed rediculous or haphazrd actually turned out being completely achievable, rewarding and even fun, what other things are out there waiting for me (or others) to simply step out and try instead of waiting to be initiated or told that it is now socially acceptable?
It was a rich experience living in the Van, and I did so for about 7 months, though I would head back to the farm on many weekends which would append my showering and eating regiment. Near the end of my adventure, however, other adventures started opening up.
Perhaps I should stop and clarify that not everything was extremely optimistic at this time. I'd quite wrecked a relationship and I had some reckoning to do. It is the benefit of hindsight, sometimes, that it allows us to see the stories about ourselves that we'd rather tell- not, perhaps, the ones that make us look like sociopaths.
Anyways.
I was offered a really great job near the end of the school year (I was teaching at a fancy school in the Vancouver area) at the school I was currently working at. I had pretty well just decided, that I wasn't going to carry on with the position I had, in lieu of striking out on a new adventure. The new offer, however, made the decision to leave much more difficult and I spent quite some energy considering it and asking the opinion of friends about it. I don't know if i've ever been more on the fence with a decision. I remember that I was almost decided to take the job, and then right before my answer was coming due, I made a realization that switched my mind and I walked into my boss' office ( the classic, principle office trope ) and told her that I was turning down both the job I currently held and the one offered for the coming school season.
When I was accepted to a new job, she announced it at a staff meeting- sending me off with good feelings.
Ok, so the different job. This is an outdoor school gig that is really neat, but importantly, gave me some five months off in the off-season (nov-march) to do something else. This is the part that I am in now. Five months of focusing on music. A dream come true.
Now, with some 3 months to go, with some challenges but also forward movement I suppose I can head into 2019 by leaving some simple thoughts behind.

1. If you feel like you are slogging through a long and often-pointless-feeling season (like university or a job that is a means to an end) that the end might actually come someday and might feel quite unexpectedly worthwhile at that point. At that point, you might actually get to start dreaming and following through on dreams, because you've learned how to work, how to see things change slowly, and will have the education and maturity that society so values to give you the income or influence you need to make things go forward.

2. Maybe you don't need to be a professional or initiate to try something you've dreamed of. You can learn a lot on the job, and a creative mind is a wonderful thing.

3.  If you sometimes ignore the feeing that you have to go along the typical strains of societal norms, you might find that you are in a completely feasible alternative which might not only create cultural change for the better, but open up a whole new world of possibility for yourself. This might mean trying something and then quitting it, because quitting isn't always such a bad thing. It might mean picking just one thing to focus on and making it a reality through intentional and strategic means. It might mean taking a hit on your income to do something that you feel compelled is more important.

We change. Maybe this is one of the great acceptances that generally happens in one's thirties. We change, and that's cool. What is also cool, however, is recognizing the ways we are the same, and the ways in which our relations remain steady, even if the way they look alter. Perhaps one of the most beautiful thing about our human stories is that we change alongside one another. Maybe not unlike that layered cliff I marvelled over today out at Mystic Beach. Layers belie time, and result in something that is still in flux, but beautiful and astounding and layered and simple all along. Here we are, with the depths of disconcerting news from this past calendar year, but maybe with the hope that the stories we tell this year will be full of conviction, ingenuity, and beauty.

And Love. May we keep finding it. May it keep finding us. 

1

Don't know Love
Sentimental
Crowded

Beams
Borders
Burgoyne

Stumble
Heavy
Tyger

Not There
Road to Run
Can't

This year, and the next five

Its been a full and messy year. Many great parts, many less-than.

I've been working on adding a teaching degree to my history one and have, overall, enjoyed the program and the colleagues I've met. I finished the program earlier this month, after finishing a very challenging, if rewarding, adventure teaching in an semi-isolated coastal community.
Prior to that I was working the farm all summer: worked harder and longer than ever. I love that job, but I was becoming exhausted by the end. I took a mini-vacation in the late summer, as I've been prone to do, but this time it was only three days and I used them to hike the West Coast Trail, and that pushed my physical and mental limit in a new way.
I was best man for my good friend's wedding this summer, and I was proud of that.
I taught some classes at the middle school on the island and the kids made me laugh daily.
The church I've been a part of spread its wings and landed in a new location with a new vision.

Meanwhile darkness surfaced, exposing his long spiny ridge along the pristine scene and threatened to turn the boat and swallow its travelers.

A marriage who were family crumbled.
People got hurt physically. Others suffered physiologically.
The world seemed as full of displacement and misunderstandings as it ever has.
I seem to keep losing sight of myself as confidence, self-esteem, and projections quake.
A relationship breaks.
When was the last time I even though I might ask a girl out for coffee?

At a place where I am supposed to be full of life, and trembling with the romance of possibility I sometimes feel like its business as usual. Nothing to get excited about.

I've been looking for the choices I can make that are likely to make positive changes. And I think i have an ok strategy now.

1. I arrange my values: I often feel pressure to do the thing which equates security. This typically means following the dollar. But will this really make such a big difference? My history professor friend Norm recently recommended worrying less about getting a downpayment on a house, because you can chase those money-holes for many years to come. However, if you want to go on a trip, or spend time volunteering, you might as well do that while you have less pressure on yourself.
The thing I've always wished I had more time to do was play music. Its the thing I don't ever want to settle into the future wishing I'd done or wondering "what if?"
So maybe I throw all caution out the window and commit to having a sorry bank account and one year of rich lifestyle filled with music every day - just so I know what will happen, instead of always wondering. To answer my soul, rather than my banker.

2. Give it time. I started thinking this spring, after a relationship had crashed and burned real bad and I was feeling like a retched person, and while I was trying not to drown in anxiety and some dismay. I thought about how much had changed in the past five years and I thought that, with the right framing of the next five years that maybe by the end I could be somebody really whole. Somebody I could be proud of. Or at least somebody who is happy. I turn 30 next year. What better time to make such a goal. But what things do I need to intentionally do which will shape these years?
Exercise more? Read more? Dance more? Employ myself in a noble cause?

3. Probably all of the above, but one idea has captivated me the most. I think doing something I find value in is good, but better yet, doing something of value with good people around me.
Back to the notion of community.
I wrote down, prior, some quotes from Donald Miller's recent book, but I omitted the one that I've probably been giving the most thought.

"I read an article that said in the next five years we will become a conglomerate of the people we hang out with."

I don't need to look up reputable studies to confirm that there's enough truth to this. Its not a new idea, and just from my own observations I suspect its more true than I want to even believe. So rather than using this information to say how little control I have over my own personality and character, I can use the information to shape myself. I just choose two things: 1. to be around people and 2. for those people to be the kind of people I want to become. So I think this is the strategy. I rearrange my priorities. I put my collegiate first, check that I'm not valuing the fleeting "security" too high, and allow time for these things to play themselves out.

I have a plethora of possibilities ahead of me, but if I keep my priorities in-line, a five year plan might work.

But how do you learn consistency? I find myself so changable. Even the past two months I feel changed me. Will I stick to this, or float like my generation floats? Dingy on the current, beating darkness with a paddle whenever it comes too close.

enough already

Remember that scene from Batman Begins when he says “It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.” I didn’t used to get that. I thought, “Hey, you are an essence of a person underneath. Like darth vader, who did bad things, but had an essence of good. Yeah, like me too. I’m a very special and excellent person at the core.” Well, I don’t really think like that so much anymore. I mean, God’s grace covers a multitude of sins and what that belief system says about me and every human is that each one has like a devine essence or something like that, and is innately valuable, and that’s really very cool- but sofar as it goes to defining yourself, I think we’ve got agency for that. I can make choices to do good, or to find good, or to not. This is how I become a co-author in the story of my life. At the end of the day, people will see the what you do, as a reflection of who you are. Not that its about reputation, necessarily. And I know that trying and good intentions are not enough either. But if I can’t speak for myself, then hopefully my actions will speak for me. I get down a lot. I get sad often. So if I’m going to feel like a terrible person, maybe I can be redeemed by my actions if I do so simply as make them habit. I don’t know. But I think there’s something to it. And I feel like I don’t really have much to speak for me right now.
I've been talking about my inner life for nearly a decade. Ranting into the void to hear the echo. Quite lost within my own world.

I don't know if I can get out.

I know James said something about faith void of works is dead, and I feel like I've become void of both. Perhaps by building one, somehow, the other can grow. But I guess that means I need to stop projecting and predicting and shut up and get off my ass.

Perhaps
there are no heroes
only the things that happen to people.
There is surely no superman.
And there is, probably, no action-player-history.
This story telling is the pins of power which tell us we have control,
when the most control we have will be that which is never noticed... the ebb of time,
and our collective will to bend it.
Faith, i suppose, is believing this to be true.
The curvature beyond the horizon and the notion that one step in front of another will change our reality.
Because we DO perceive,
and we might even experience compassion
and this
in itself
is more miraculous than the acts of heroes.

read a book again.

I crossed paths with Werner up in the Shushwap when i was there in the summer. He lent me a new book by Donald, which I didn't know had been written. Both Werner and I have long been fans, although I think we've felt more like friends, of Donald since he rose to prominence in our teen years. His books, without fail, have managed to feel like a humorous conversation with a friend who has been recently traveling the same season of life. They have always been validating and inspiring, if unassuming, companions.

So i set aside a few hours and read his latest at a coffee shop downtown Nanaimo. As I did I wrote down sections which resonated with me, just assuming that his latest book would inform my life yet again.
And it did, but in a way that reminded me how far the drift has taken me from the flow.

Its called Scary Close, and here are a few parts I wrote down:

"When I'm alone I don't have to perform for anybody"

I love being by myself- not for longer than a few days mind you- hiking the trails on the West Coast. Donald talks about dating his wife who he felt he didn't need to perform for. I am concerned that I can't tell the difference between performing and not. I'm very good at best face forward. I've worked sales enough to know that I am. I also know that the internal life doesn't always reflect the interior, but I get by telling myself its more important to perform than wear my heart on my sleeve. Later, however, Dan asserts that "Environments in which we are encouraged to hide our faults are toxic."
But, of course, I ask, is there anything wrong with wanting to be alone on the trail? The thing is, I know I resist inviting others along, because I apparently like my own company best. I am, however, becoming less convinced that this is the show of strength I've built it up to be.

"I've come to believe that there is something noble about doing little with your life save offering love to a person who is offering it back."

I'm not sure I can buy into this yet. I'm still caught up in the world of prestige.

"I like what Victor Frankl wrote, about how we aren't designed to spend too much time thinking about ourselves, that we are healthier when we're distracted by a noble cause."

This idea is sticky. Especially as I consider where my life will head in the next couple years. I've probably spent too much time with me. I could always blame my homeschooling in grade-school. Or i could blame the church for telling me I could change the world. But I should probably blame no-one, not even myself, and move forward in a more collective consciousness. I do tend to be happier when I have close friends or a team around me. I think as my focus shifts from the individual (me) to the group, my problems become reduced in the process, or as my focus shifts to a noble cause. Don later talks about people who, at the core, believe that, despite their flaws, they are really good for other people.
Talk about a focus shift.

"I'd have to trust that my flaws were the ways through which I would receive grace"

Well nuts. Maybe not a new idea, but one which bears repeating, maybe especially in the time we inhabit. I can see that in this way of seeing things you feel innate value not just in your success, but also in your failures. Its an idea that transcends the economics of our zero-sum planet. Its a revolutionary idea. Its a hard one to breathe in, but if anything can save us...

"much of the time I've spent trying to impress people has been a waste"

Is it misplaced self-preservation? Because yes. I feel like this also. Maybe, instead of looking for people that I can impress, I should seek people who I can ask for help.
Donald goes on to talk about how giving time is a proof of love, keeping us from getting too self-absorbed. This is an idea I struggle with. Because I like to doll out my time to me. Like a big game where you are losing if someone else takes some of that time without giving anything back. Of course, this is why spending time with someone doing nothing is a powerful gesture, and one I'm apparently not arrived at achieving.

"controlling people are the loneliest people in the world."

No comment

"There were many reasons I didn't get married in my thirties, but one of them is I didn't want to let go of my need to accumulate money, validation, and influence."

Well, I think I can say something similar about my twenties, and knowing my tendency to play the long game over taking a risk, it could be what my thirties end up looking like. but I don't think this just pertains just to marriage or something like that either. I can always accumulate more security and attempt for more prestige. All the live long life. Risks that will cause my life to spike from the mold, however, those fly away as time sets my trajectory in the frame that came before me.

"if a man has no sense of meaning, Frankl argued, he will numb himself with pleasure."

There seems to be a divergence between the man I've been becoming and the man I keep wanting to become. Whether my vector will alter, however may be defined by something as simple, as fleeting and as human as choice.

follow your heart...

There’s this great ted talk by a guy named Schwartz, who did this research on choice, and came up with a compelling result: While choice is generally agreed by economists to be a good thing, something that gives people happiness, there is, however, a terminal amount of choice that we need for happiness- and we’ve exceeded it in our society. The problem is, in the world I live in, is that there are SO many options, SO MANY possibilities, a INDEFINITE PLETHORA of CHOICES that I can make about my own life- from my career and country of residence to the brand of salad dressing I buy and kind of romantic life I want to lead, that one of two things frequently happen. The first is that we become paralysed by the breadth of possibilities and can’t decide on one, choosing rather to defer making any decision at all. The second is that we choose but then are haunted with regret that perhaps what we chose wasn’t the best choice.
I notice this problem manifesting in my life all the time. The simple answer, of course, is to just make choices- become an author or co-author of the story you are living and don’t think about the counter-factuals. There is another difficulty I find, however. This is if you don’t know WHAT you want, which is often the case for me. Why don’t I know what I want? Because there’s so many things I could have, and I can’t have them all, I am wreaked with indecision. Why else? Because everyone, from peers, to family, to the movies I watch, seem to have different suggestions about what I should want. Since I don’t seem to know myself, I end up trying some of their advice, with mixed results.

I just put an end to the best dating relationship I’ve ever had, and it sucks. I thought that no matter which way the relationship went It would be a net positive. Either it would work and we’d grow together in happy coupleness, or it would fail, and we’d both be better off for it once the fallout was over.

And now that the fallout is ongoing, I feel caught in the middle. What if I made the wrong decision? I feel like if I knew what I wanted a little more concretely, I would stop living in this used-to-be-exciting world of indisicion (“keeping my options open” “living like a leaf on the wind” “remaining openminded to what the future may hold”) and live satisfactorily with some compromises for the greater end of my desire.

At what point don’t you need to know what else is out there and just be happy with what is right in front of you?

I’ve gone on a couple trips recently. They were both to interesting places, but they really just made me appreciate home, because I didn’t think these other places were anywhere near as pleasant as home, for me.

Now, is that just my own experience of home, or is my home actually better? Does it matter?

I’ve got this feeling, sometimes, like I’m supposed to go somewhere, challenge myself, live cross culturally. Maybe this is because of movies I’ve watched. Maybe its because I want to believe I have the ability to be a world-adventurer like Indiana Jones (or Walter Mitty). Maybe its because I feel like if I’m going to make a difference on the world, I need to get to where I can make a more noticeable difference. Maybe I just don’t want to believe I can’t do it, and need to prove it to myself. Perhaps its just romantisization, like joining the French legion or sailing around the world. Maybe its such a big part of how I’ve seen my future self, that now that I’m getting right into adulthood and I haven’t done what it took to get there, I am disappointed in myself. Like how some would say I should’ve dated more girls. Like some would have said I should have traveled more, and others would have said I should’ve just done what made me happy more. Instead I did a little bit of each and got a whole lot of nowhere. Well, not no-where, but no were specific, and I still don’t know where I’m headed. Some people know. Some people look at my indisicion as a good thing, see it as flexibility, but there’s a problem if I always thing I should be doing something else somewhere else to fulfill my adolescent, joseph Campbell mythical idea of myself. I’m living a story now, not later. And this is disturbing too, because it doesn’t always look like a very good story. No arc. No victories or conclusions. But if there’s certain future versions of myself that I can’t visualize for the hero epic, maybe I am hamstringing my choice-making procedure- kind of like how an earlier blog talked about how we don’t know all the possibilities that may await us, if we could just see them to try them. So I need to accept that many futures are possible, but that doesn’t help me know which is best. Guess it doesn’t matter. I make the best decisions I can now, and stop expecting good things to happen. I might not always get what I want, but, hell, maybe I’ll still get what I need.

I think its time to take another page from Merton

“One of the most important—and most neglected—elements in the begninnings of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the be beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us in the creatures of God. We do not see these things because we have withdrawn from them. In a way we have to. In modern life our senses are so constantly bombarded with stimulation from every side that unless we developed a kind of protective insensibility we would go crazy trying to respond to all the advertisments at the same time!
The first step in the interior life, nowadays, is not, as some might imagine, learning not to see and taste and hear and feel things. On the contrary, what we must do is begin by unlearning our wrong ways of seeing, tasting, feeling, and so forth, and acquire a few of the right ones.
For asceticism is not merely a matter of renouncing television, cigarettes, and gin. Beofre we can begin to be ascentics, wefirst have to learn to see life as if it were something more than a hypnotizing telecast. And we must be able to taste something besides tobacco and acohol: we must perhaps even be able to tast these luxuries themselves as if they too were good.
How can our conscience tell us whether or not we are renouncing things unless it first of all tells us that we know how to use them properly? For renunciation is not an end in itself: it helps us to use things better. It helps us to give them away….
In an aesthetic experience, in the creation or the contemplation of a work of art, the psychological conscience is able to attain some of its highest and most perfect fulfillments. Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

things left behind. things ahead

I keep losing stuff, and sometimes I get afraid that it might be important.

I keep losing stuff as I gain stuff.

I lost the time I used to spend in close-reading and prayer
I gained a degree
I lost the energy to do volunteer somewhere once a week.
I stayed out of debt
I kept loosing community, and I feel like it was because I didn’t give enough.
I learned to be productive alone
I lost the time I used to spend reading for pleasure and extra learning
I do well at my job
I lose friends
I gain colleagues
I gain a relationship
I lose time alone
I lose a relationship
I gain feelings of oblivion
I lose the time to walk for days in the woods
I have a two year plan
Cheap rent, but nowhere to sing.
I walk away to try and gain perspective
When I come back I’ve lost even more

And now, I feel like I’ve lost most elements of what one would call a faith life.
And I’m desperately afraid that I might lose two other things that keep me:
Time to create music
Time to walk and breathe.

And here’s the thing. I’ve gained intelligence, and skills to contribute to society, but it feels like I’ve lost those things that might be just as important: passion, empathy, soul. I pray creativity never joins the list.
And I feel tricked sometimes. Because I keep trying to live well, but feel like I keep getting into more of a quagmire. I know why I couldn’t justify spending all my money on music lessons, or all my time on hiking, or all my academic focus on writing, but I also feel, sometimes, like I missed opportunities to do something fulfilling. Yes, now I feel like a first-class middle class whiner, complaining about how much I can do with my life. And yet, while I tried things that society said were good, I just got further and further from what I’ve always felt like were my essential fulfilments. In my reach for the top of the pyramid, I got lost in the bottom. What is this to say? This pedantic complaining?

I went for a walk recently. Walked from where there was no snow to where there was snow. And then down again. It was beautiful. My hiking friends commented that they enjoyed the visit to the winterland but had no desire to hike for days in it- didn’t understand those that did. I was silent.
You do?
Yes. All the time.
Why don’t you
Takes time to do those kinds of things. Investment of time.
…
You should have small goals, one of them said. Too much of our life is spent peering at a pipe dream which will rob us of the present and fill us with regret and self-loathing if we fail to attain. Fill us with empty fulfillment if we do attain, likely as not.
I agreed, to live our lives in the now, make conscious choices and live with them. To not let regret condemn us or choices paralize us, but to live and do simply the best we can.
And to have those people around you, my other friend said. You don’t need a lot of friends. Just a few to travel life with. That is what is important.

problem being that I never really knew what I wanted, and in attempt to listen to people’s answers to the question of what that might be, I ignored my own instincts, and I still don’t know whose were correct. But I suspect that my hiking friends were, despite being young, were both honest and wise.

I loved the movie “The secret Life of Walter Mitty” it was so full of romance, to the point where I might think that the moral of the story is that I need to go traveling to cold places every time I watch it… a conjecture that may or may not make me any more fulfilled. But I don’t think that’s the takeaway. In the film, the motto of the magazine “Life” was said to be “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to find each other, and to feel: that is the purpose of life”. Ironically, the protagonist, played by Ben Stiller, has to differentiate between the way he sees his life, and the reality of it (see my next post for the batman analogy).
I suppose we all live our lives by different values, or storylines, and I’ve been writing about the philosophical beauty of a divine storyline, but I also like the Walter Mitty "Life" one, which I don’t think is incompatible. But its worth remembering that the world is often closer than we think. Just beyond a wall, behind a passion, through a pair of eyes.

Thomas merton on applying data sets to spiritual improvement

"It may be true that a rich man can better afford to throw money out the window than a poor man: but neither the spending nor the waste of money is what makes a man rich. He is rich y virtue of what he has, and his riches are valuable to him for what he can do with them.
As for freedom, according to this analogy, it grows no greater by being wasted, or spent, but it is given to us as a telent to be traded with until the coming of Christ. In this trading we part with what is ours only to recover it with interest. We do not destroy it or throw it away. We dedicate it to some purpose, and this dedication makes us freer than we were before. Because we are freer, we are happier. We not only have more than we had but we bocome more than we were. This having and being come to us in a deepening of our union with the will of God. Our will is strengtheneed in obedience to the demands of objective reality. Our conscience is enlighteneed and it looks out upon a vastly widened horizon. We are able to see far nobler possibilities for the exercise of our freedom because we have grown in charity, and because we are enriched in divine grace we find in ourselves the power to attain ends that had been beyond us before.
All these fruits are meant to be gathered by our freedom when we do the will of God. It is for this that we account ourselves happy when we know His will and do it, and realize that the greatest unhappiness is to have no sense of His purposes or His designs either for ourselves or fort he rest of the world. 'I walked at large,' says the Psalmist, "because I have sought after thy commandments" (Psalm 118:45). "I have been delighted in the way of thy testimonies as in all riches.'"

What this is teaching me is a little about the moral application of the Data Sets lesson of the external world i was discussing in the previous post. In short, we see options, but are often blind to the best option. In this case, the best way to find happiness might actually be to rein in our many desires to one which resounds with a story of purpose. It makes me think about the greatest artists, who were almost always a mixture between recklessly absurd experimental genius and refined practiced precise conventions (left them be their predecessors). This is how we make meaning of our lives and leave meaning behind us. To create as people created. To accept that we are co-creaters in a story that both confines us and liberates us. (For in-fact no-one of us is truly independent, but are part of a greater functioning community without which all of our lives would have less meaning)

Surely, I left religion behind because it was killing my soul. Now I see the Christ who stood against judgmentality, elitism, dogmatism, psuedeo-intellectual-culture war-othering, and the politics of control through the use of fear, and I see God revealed. Now when I think about what true missionaries do, I realize that it isn't culture upraisal or the replacing of one metaphysical worldview for another, but uprooting these systematic-evils (if it isn't a misnomer to call them that) with a possibility to see God as transcending all of them, and his grace as razing the last. It is a mission to liberate.
But these evils aren't the only thing that keep us in bondage. Just like there are many options for a career or place or way to live, so there are many activities (that might be defined as moral or a-moral) that one can choose, and they may choose to try the full plethora of having left the obsessively legalistic control of organized religion. I know that I began to try and considered to try many more things, especially before I returned to the possibility of Christ as liberator as defining my Christianity instead of Church as captivator.

But Merton seems to say that the greater horizon is beyond this surface domain.

"Our conscience is enlighteneed and it looks out upon a vastly widened horizon."

data sets and future formation... rather awkward attmepts to say something which I think is important.

I've been thinking a lot about data-sets recently

What i mean by this is that we go off what we know: our worldviews, our conscious or sub-conscious list of perceivable options for ourselves.
I know I'm being broad.

More specifialy I was thinking about why some people succeed to more profitable or happy careeers whilst others suffer on in the more menial- when it seems to me that often the latter are more equipped for the formers' jobs. I was thinking about some people I knew who grew up in lower-class families and ended up working at gas-stations or grocery stores when they were bright enough to study and get better jobs, and when some of the young students i encountered in university, who exhibited less common-sense, would probably end up better employed because of the expectations that they would. Their families, environments, class peirs, indicted that they would end up a banker or a beauricrat, and that this would be handed to them as easily as their post secondary funding was handed to by their parents.

I don't mean to generalize, but I think this does happen all the time, and its subtle, because we often don't realize how our own lives are dictated by what we expect out of it.
I don't mean some "positive thinking" mode of success. I just mean that I think sometimes the kid working at the gas-station has more gumption to be a banker than the university graduate does if it was offered to him as an option in his own mind.

I've been trying to figure this out for myself. In what way am i the guy working at the gas station? or maybe i'm the over-confident graduate. Or maybe I'm both, but I still haven't considered the outlandish option of not selling my labour, and working for myself instead. Maybe there's more options if i stand further back.

I've been planning on taking a teaching certification program, but here's my conundrum: am i just choosing teaching because it's the obvious choice in my set of data?
That is, we all know who teachers are. So when people hear i have a history degree they think, even suggest, I'm going into teaching. They even say I will make a great teacher- and while I might and I appreciate the confidence- I might as well just make a great "capital plannings program manager" (a title i just pulled off a job-posting site) but no-one would say that because no-one has any idea of what that entails; whereas we've all met teachers.

So am i defaulting, or is there something better out there that i'm not thinking of because i'm too lost within the box?
Am i locked within a geography, schedule, lifestyle, model, paygrade-expectation, management model, economic commonplace, linguage, experience, arrogance, insecurity, competitivity, idea of myself, concept of a future, others expectations of me, or any number of things i can't think of that are holding me back from another (better?) potential? Almost certainly.

But at what point to i hold off, survey options? How do i even get outside the box? And when do i charge full steam ahead into one innevitable fate without thinking about the rest?

tomorrow.
and the day after that.
and the next day.

A walk

After spending some very nice days on Pender Island I promptly discovered that the ferry from Sidney didn't run to Anacortes. And while i should have gone and taken the ferry from Victoria to Seattle, I thought for some reason that I'd be better off going to Vancouver and crossing the border on a bus. I bounced off Seattle by way of en route to Portland, where i enjoyed some tasty breakfast, met some very nice people, and went to the church that Don Miller said was so great in his books. It was pretty hipster, but not un-nice.
I took a bus to Seaside, and knew i was in small-town country now. Hiked to Cannon beach and was taken away by haystack rock which was about a thousand times more inspiring to see than the Space Needle was. On those wobbly hiker legs i stood roadside with thumb in the air and promptly gave up on hitching. Nevertheless, a very nice older woman picked me up and offered me some pot while we drove down the coast to one of the tiny and destitute looking- but in an incredibly beautiful setting- little towns where she lived. I declined the pot, which she only had for medical reasons anyways, but accepted her offer to drop me at the local bus stop which would take me through to the next bigger town. There i found a Starbucks (an institution which would continue to be my internet hub from city to city) and a department store which i walked around for hours before finding my way to the local Denny's, scarfing down a massive meal, and then settling in for the night to read a book. The next morning I found a local bus which would take me back to Portland, which it did, in time to take another bus through the night to San Francisco. With some thanks to a very uncomfortable bus-stop layover (where security would come ask you for your ticket the moment you started to drift off on the hard-floor as if only free-loading bums would do that) and two interesting and long-talking coach-mates I perhaps dozed for an hour. Perhaps. In San Francisco I had coffee with one of my new coach friends before finding a wonderful camera store which sold me a replacement wide-angle lens for the camera i had borrowed from my Dad. I knew i needed a smaller backpack, and after some considerable wandering around and discovery of some of the less romantic parts of the city I eventually bought one and after some more wandering around, found the hostel i had made a reservation at. I don't remember much of the rest of that day except that by the time sleep came i had had the same pair of shoes on for as long as I'd essentially been awake. Sixty some hours. Gross.
San Fransisco was beautiful after that. I ran across the big red bridge. I walked along the boardwalks and saw beautiful people smiling, enjoying the warm evening. I took a great tour of China Town. After eating otherwise poor-quality food everywhere on my adventure, I now couldn't hardly find bad-quality food if i wanted to. But then I went and left.
I loved the train to LA, excepting some annoying patrons. The scenery was great. And rail was more comfortable than bus coach by the length of an American Football field. I got off near UCLA, which smelled beautifully of blossoms or flowers of some kind. It was warm, and I saw many cute couples, some with roses in hand, walking arm in arm with their Valentine's day dates. I imagined that perhaps I'd find something to do on Valentines day somewhere- like singles bingo or something cheesy like that, but instead I had to catch a bus to Santa Monica, and LA's busses were not about to be as conducive as San Fran. By the time I was at my, relitavely expensive and generally blase hostel at SM I was ready to call it a day.
Sure the beach was alright, and I met a nice guy from New Mexico at Santa Monica, and I met a very interesting man dressed as a tree at Venice Beach, and a very funny TV writer who gave me a ride between the two, but by the time I caught a crazy bus to the crazier Greyhound Station, I was ready to get the $%&* out of Dodge... or in this case, Los Angeles. In hindsight, you really do need a car to get around that part of the state.
San Diego was supposed to be reconnassance time. I would gather my chits, consult my new maps, and plan my next move. I though i might go to Mexico for a few days. I had put a reservation on a car rental back in LA to get out and potentially into Joshua Tree or even Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, but that was a few days away.

Now that i was in San Diego I began to hit rock bottom. I got a familiar diminishment in spirit which warned me i might need to go home sooner than my plane was booked for- some two weeks away. I would miss seeing Arizona, but I was missing my drive more. I think I was ready to admit that I'm not the lone ranger I've always epitomized. A good thing to know in any case. Pack animals we are, and I missed my pack. But I was also not self-disparaging about this fact. If i wanted to go home, I wasn't about to give myself a hard time about that. It had been a good run, and aside from the jets flying overhead all day, the hostel at Point Loma in San Diego was very nice and affordable; so I stayed a few days.

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

C. S. Lewis

While in SD I ate some fantastic sea food at the beautiful harbour, rented bikes with new friends and rode to the top of point Loma, jammed out pop tunes on a piano and guitar at the hostel with a guy (I think he was from Minnesota) and saw the underwhelming but highly toted San Diego park. The hostel was also only a walk from the Airport, so I rearranged flights and got one that flew from there to Vancouver, and on my way out I saw the anti-submarine, navy-trained dolphins passing through the harbor.
My Flight bounced off Phoenix, which I'm told is not as interesting as Tuscon or Flagstaff, but at least i got to get into Arizona in some respect, and see its horizon for a moment before the light died.
I would like to drive that golden sea someday.

I went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sun down, for going out, I found, was really going in.

John Muir

So I returned much sooner than I'd anticipated, which was just as well since I really was pretty broke anyways- or so i realized once i surveyed my accounts. The dollar exchange rate had been cruel, and the fact that the currency exchange at the airport in Vancouver took me for an extra few dollars as a "fee" to change my greenbacks back to Canadian really annoyed me. I had to bunker down in the airport for the duration of the night to catch transit to the first ferry home, and when i did step outside (having abandoned all warm clothing in San Fransisco) I had to grit my teeth and second guess that I'd really wanted to be home again. I had, strangely, missed the cooler climate while in San Diego, but wearing shorts at 6 AM in February made me wonder if I had been delusional.

Its funny. Friends asked me what the deal was with the trip. Was I going to "find myself" or something? I never expected an epiphany to strike me on the road. I didn't expect nothing, but I didn't know what to expect except a change of scenery and lots of time by myself to be self-reflexive and breathe deeply. A change of scenery, I have come to belive now, can do a lot for ones psyche. I felt like I was just going through the motions so much of the time last year. I was living in a blur of time. I sometimes described my life like someone else was living it and i was just a spectator watching it go by. Clarity, however, found me on the road, though it never came like a beam of light or a Eureka. It came in a coming home and cleaning house. I suppose it came in realizing what I wanted, accepting who I was, and leaving some things behind for a new chapter. Three weeks in the wilderness, or whatever, and I get that?! Not exactly. I think maybe conlclusions build over time, but it takes a steppping back, out of the mundanity to get the clarity on it. It was upon stepping back into "my life" that I realized how this all would pan out.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Henry David Thoreau

I'm not saying i got it together. I still don't know much of what next month or next year holds, but I'm more confident in who i want to be next month and next year, I think.

Just to clear it up, although I called this short blog 'walking' I didn't walk everywhere. I walked from ship to bus to train to light rail to taxi to car to bicycle to bus to plane and covered distance that way. There was, however, lots of walking in between, and perhaps, more importantly, every trip begins and ends with a walk. There is something about walking I think, that people have done for millennia to figure things out, and it is this persistent idea that persists. Not to be confused with nomadicism, for in my story, as in most, the adventurer comes home, or finds home, or achieves something which he can bring back with him to revive his existence.

The car park and adjacent lot looked like nothing at all that day, but then nothing is what I'd expected of them. Perhaps that is the very essence, and beauty, of place, even if I can't define it. The way anywhere can take hold, and burrow deep within. The way it can dance when we allow it to. Which is why these days I prefer to think of place as wherever I happen to be and the relationship that can be brokered with it.

Julian Hoffman The Small Heart of Things

Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.

J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit

a day in san francisco

First impressions: Lanky, Tatoo sleeves, black mohawk, generous smile. Second impressions: kind conversant and intelligent. He was leading a walking tour and on the way to its start he led off asking me some general questions about where i was from. As I began to return his niceties with my own queries I uncovered a third layer of information which rather outstripped my stories in stark interest.

Anton had grown up with a Greek (and Greek Orthodox) Mother who had migrated from Quebec, and with a father, who I took to be Italian, (and Roman Catholic). He was raised in San Francisco's Little Italy- a stone throw from Chinatown. Thus he had political dual citizenship, religious dual schismship -if you will- and was obviously rather keen to the way cultural diversity effects us.

When I told him where I called home he flattered it. Said that if he were to live in another city on basis of its own merits, that mine would top his list. This, of course, made me wonder what he had to compare it to.
A lot, it would seem.

Having received his masters of divinity from a Roman Catholic institution in New Orleans, Anton became a monk in a monastery in Athos for what he said was "many years" - though this confused me, because he didn't look so much older than me. In time he decided to study eastern traditions by living at their monasteries, and as an ambassador on behalf of his tradition. Now he was a lay monk, living back in his home city of San Francisco- a place I wonder if he'd ever left in spirit.
He was my tour guide through his old backyard of Chinatown, and as he took our tour group into, first a Buddhist, and then a Taoist place of observance. He revealed that his immersion to an understanding of these traditions dated to his childhood in that corner of town. He would never leave San Francisco for my city on basis of its own merit, not while this was his home- I could tell that. Anton personified what I liked best about his city.

That night he called out Spanish names in a Día de Muertos themed game of bingo in the pub next to the hostel. And as he did I heard him laugh to his friend, the bartender, how there was something absurd about someone, with his Mdiv, repeating mispronounced Spanish phrases like a trained parrot for a handful of travelers in some tiny hole in this city's many walls.
"And yet," he came back, continuing his aside a few minutes later.
"And yet this is actually one of my favorite things to do".

I wish I knew more of Anton's story. Wish i could pick his brain for hours. But maybe a city itself is no more eager to render those answers to a passer-through than any of its faithful sons.

Yes, you may see the genuine smiles on my plethora of faces, but you may not know why I smile.

To be true to one's own joy in the mosaic of a community, is this your lesson for me? Or is it that it's ok to go home if that is what feeds you, for perhaps that is what defines the beauty- even the simplest and the smallest of joys.

This is today

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-4-dark-sides-being-in-love_p2/

This is the most inspiring, romantic/realist/just plain decent advice I've ever read on Cracked... at least it sure seems like it to me.

I guess that most of the time when people talked about long-term committed loving relationships, at least over the last couple years, I've sortof smiled and nodded and not believed half of it. But once in a while somebody who actually has lived a little drops a bomb that I can't ignore.

"the amazing thing about being married to someone this long" this person said, "is that they know more about all your worst things than anyone else, and yet they keep loving you... and alternatively I guess I know the same about them, but I love him more today than twenty years ago."

and then there was this one,

"The one thing that does stink about being married to someone you like so much is the question of: What if they die before me? Where does that leave me?"

Holy shit.
yes. That's what i thought, but i let it go, because it just went flying through the air like mashed potatoes at Christmas and we went back to talking about the weather or what-the-crap-ever.

Love that's a long haul...

You know, I'm pretty damn sure that's what i want.
For a bit i was wondering if its all about the action, the romance of playing the field.
F*ck that.

Maybe the fairy tale is over-romanticized... yeah, that's actually pretty likely. And maybe half of all people who get married don't stay married, and that stat is only going to get better because people stop getting married... But on the other hand, its what my parents did, and its what their parents did, and so on... I'm starting to accept that tradition and convention are not the same thing necessarily, and if i ever have kids I think I'll probably do them a disservice if i don't pass on some kind of tradition which i value.

F*ck its hard to be a good human being some days, but I'm starting to think that tradition might actually help.

I love this story I heard about a rabbi's answer to being asked about their Jewish athiest population. He says that its ok. some will return to the tradition. In the mean time, the tradition- the community- will carry on for them, and thereby carry them.

That seems right. Righter than this stand-alone die-alone sort of mentality that many have.

So I get up in the morning and try and face the day. I wrote a while back about switches going on in the brain, where an immediate switch is sometimes possible. I wrote about being a good person because of a belief in the sanctity of life, because you love someone, because you believe in God. But shit, sometimes i wonder if all you have is tradition: a convicted convention, if you will. It says get up in the morning and do it even though you're not sure it matters, even if you've got no-one watching you, even if you're not sure you believe God is watching or even there today. Get up and damn-well do it anyways, because its fucking worth it. Because its better to believe the romantics, the artists, the theologians, the bravest philosophers and Jesus Christ himself for the sake of hoping that the sun will come up on their words, than throwing caution to the effects-of-the-wind and living like an animal to its carnality.
I'll be the romantic, so help me God.

Everything must change
There's a mirror showing me the ugly truth
These bones they ache with holy fire
But I've got nothing to give, just a life to live

If your world is without color
I will carry you, if you carry me

-Martin Smith